The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time (2012)

deadspin.com

100 pointsbrudgers27 comments

So strange.. I just watched this yesterday (Making sure my DVD's are ripped ok before they decay).

How does it hold up 25 years later? Mr. Burns wants the best player (his childhood baseball stars), but smithers notes, they might not be the best choice now.. the "modern" players that are assembled aren't so modern anymore. Its a fun episode and holds up ok. Wade Boggs arguing with Barney cracks me up.

The baseball players voice acting is decent, with some standouts.

The credits have a custom song, thats pretty good too.

> The baseball players voice acting is decent, with some standouts.

I will always remember how badly good Ken Griffey, Jr's voice acting was. There was a blooper reel that made the rounds on the tubes but Fox seems to have nerfed it.

Roger clemens clucking like a chicken always gets me. I believe he made the actual sounds for that too.

This is one of my favorite episodes. The "signals" that Mr. Burns gives just before Homer gets beaned (spoiler alert) get me every time.

Since you mention DVDs, I assume you've listened to the commentary. I find them almost as entertaining as the episodes themselves.

Every time I'm at the barber's and they ask if I want my sideburns trimmed I can't not think of and laugh at that bit in this episode. As far as I know, I don't ever have any significant sideburns to speak of and that episode really called into question my understanding of what exactly a sideburn is.

I love these old write ups on classic Simpsons episodes. The first 7-8 seasons or so are pure magic and we'll miss John Swartzwelder always.

Highly recommend his novels to any classic Simpsons fans.

It's funny, I think 7-11 are the peak. Everyone has a different range.

(Jonathan Frink voice) If there are more than 784 people assigning ranges, then your argument is contradicted by the pigeonhole principle.

(Jonathan Frink voice intensifies) For a single assigning of range, you have a start point and end point which allows for 784 * 783 / 2 combinations which is ~300,000 but since some people might opt for multiple ranges (ie: S02E07 - S09E17 & S21E13 - S31E11), that expands the result space. At it's limit, people could simply list their qualifying and non-qualifying episodes in a binary fashion which results in 2^784 combinations which is approximately 10^(784/10*3) (because 2^10~10^3) or 10^235. This is far more than the global population so pigeonhole principle wouldn't apply.

How do you figure?

Assuming ranges are A-B, where A <= B (you could like one season) and A, B are in [1, 28] then there should be just 406 ranges (28 that start at season 1, 27 at 2, etc...).

D'oh! I just squared 28 instead of getting the 28th triangle number.

And I always thought (and still think) that season 4 was the pinnacle.

I always thought the book was better.

I have trouble believing that the Mattingly's problem with sideburns in the episode wasn't influenced by his hair problem with the Yankees. Maybe he recorded is lines before that happened, but I have to believe they at least re-arranged the lines to emphasize the issue more after that happened (like maybe it was originally more of a throwaway line and they decided to make it the reason he couldn't play)...

Baseball and the Simpsons. Thank you kind person for the perfect combination of topics to drive away the world-is-on-fire news a little bit today. :-)

Whether or not keeping them is financially worthwhile I'm still holding on to my baseball card collection for sentimental purposes. Got cards for every one mentioned in that episode.

The closing song is fantastic too by the way.

It's amazing how long I've heard this song, and I still remember what it sounds like and sing along to the lyrics!

It's scary how often this happens to me. Including mentally mocking "daaarryl daaarryl" whenever I meet someone with the name.

except the promos at the time for the episode ruined the ending as they showed what happened the only time Homer got up to bat.

Do people really watch the Simpsons for the plot?

Well I really wanted to know who shot Mr. Burns.

We did up until it all went downhill. Circa 2001, they went from hand-drawn to digital animation so the quality of the writing took a back seat to getting quick jokes on the air in a few weeks instead of months. Hand-drawn required more money and time for the animators in Asia (maybe South Korea?). And why waste all that money on bad writing? Same goes for using the old punch-card systems.

True enough: everything went to hell when they started putting the original Homer's writing down on animal skins.

I think things went downhill when they introduced Seymour Skinner as an imposter[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principal_and_the_Pauper

This sounds like a comment from someone who has not watched the first 10 seasons. Simpsons had many solid plots.

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