Mine’s gotta be Marge on the Lam. It’s got Ballet as bears driving little cars, it’s got Homer about to have his arms sawed off cause he didn’t let go of soda, it’s got good waffles sticking together, it’s got moonshine straight from your own still, it’s got ghost cars, it’s got Miguel Sanchez, it’s got Sunshine and Lollypops and Raibows, it’s got precious antique cans, it’s got suspects in a…red car who are passing directly beneath the earth’s sun…now. it’s hilarious and really encapsulates season 5s ‘fuck it, we ball’ attitude.
The problem with this is I’m not sure how to gauge whether an episode is underrated.
I know there are some famous episodes but pretty much all S1-S8 episodes are great, I rewatch them regularly on nights I’m not watching kino. And all of the Simpsons is so much better now as an adult, there was so much I could not have understood when I watched them as a kid when they came out.
Homer’s Enemy (S8) is still my favorite though. "Suuure. You’ve never been?” was always an unforgettable line for me.
I CALL HIM GAMBLOR!!
I call it the Spruce Moose! Hop in!
But sir-
I said, “hop in”
FREEMASONS RUN THE COUNTRY!
“Get my razor! Draw a bath! And get these Kleenex boxes off my feet!”
“Certainly, sir. And, uh, the jars of urine?”
“Oh, we’ll hang on to those.”
The classic era are all classics and I may be a bigger simpsons nerd than many here so I sorta know what the classics of the classics are. I think $Springfield or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling would count. It’s I’m the mix but not making top ten lists in clickbait articles.
Vera said that?
What would you say are the top 3 clickbait list episodes?
Last Exit to Springfield, Marge Vs the Monorail and Mr Plow
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’ll have a random scene or line from the Simpson’s in my head for years and later find out it’s everyone’s favorite thing.
I would guess it doesn’t count as underrated, but yeah, Homer’s Enemy is the episode for me too. The B-plot doesn’t even do a lot for me (okay, Grimes including “A son who owns a factory!” when angrily listing off Homer’s blessings was pretty great), but every scene with Grimes is pure gold. The scene where he’s laughing maniacally watching Homer drive off after tricking Homer and then stops laughing once Homer backs up into his car is amazing slapstick comedy, and the contest scene is perfection.
“Could you explain your model young man?” “Well, basically I just copied the plant we have now.” Burns is immediately impressed.
Yeah, that’s the best part of it. It’s such a great tragi-comedy.
What is it about grimes that so grabs the american cultural focus? I’m not trying to joke or anything, but everyone who is a Simpsons fan is obsessed with Grimes. Obsessed is too strong a word, but you know what I mean. It’s probably the single episode that has the most written about it.
Is it because it’s more “realistic”? Do Simpsons fans actually want wild fantastical adventures about the Simpsons dealing with everyday problems? (I can’t remember the exact quote from that focus group scene from The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy show. Incidentally the scene right before lives rent free in my head. Just a guy asking a kid if he’d like to come with him to see some cartoons)
The episode is pretty dark for a Simpsons episode and Homer acts a little out-of-character (he acts dumber but more earnestly than he usually does). It’s a huge contrast if you compare Homer in this episode and Jerkass Homer during the Skully years. That rubs some people the wrong way. This episode is one of the few Simpsons episode with a permanent death, so it’ll always be talked about relative to other episodes just like how the episode where Maude dies gets talked about and even referenced in later episodes even if the actual episode is meh.
It’s also a season 8 episode, so there’s the wider context of people pointing to it as the end of the classic era and people not liking season 8 for being too meta. I don’t think the episode would get this much attention if it were a season 6 episode. In general, a lot of season 8 and season 9 episodes get the spotlight pointed at them because there’s a faction of the Simpsons fanbase who thinks that this episode marks the end of the classic era. Homer’s Enemy and The Principal and the Pauper get the most heat.
I honestly don’t really know. I hadn’t realized it was popular until this thread.
I just like it because it’s such a silly dark comedy. Homer has this genuinely good intention to befriend Grimes but Homer ends up just torturing him until he accidentally kills himself out of total frustration. If anything, though, I feel like it’s making fun of the typical privileged and oblivious American middle class which is represented by Homer. Grimes is a working class person with a hard life who got lucky enough to get ahead, but no matter how hard Grimes works, Grimes realizes he can never compete with the life that Homer just accidentally falls ass backwards into and takes for granted.
As an adult, I can really relate to Grimes with his sobering realization that his upbringing will never be cast away and where he comes from will always determine how far he gets no matter what he does, especially in comparison to some idiot like Homer who will never understand struggle. But, I can also really relate to Homer and how his good intentions in a situation are not only are misinterpreted in the most negative light possible but they actually lead to absolute disaster. It’s kind of Larry David-esque or similar to Curb. Although the difference is that Larry would just get annoyed, or I would laugh at myself, but Homer just falls asleep and snores at Grimes’s funeral indicating he never learned anything or even cared that much which makes it even darker (and funnier) that Grimes took it that hard.