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.
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.