Talking Simpsons - Radio Bart With Matt McMuscles

Always love hearing Matt on the podcasts, and I hugely appreciated the deep dives into the musical super group/event this was parodying, as well as the Chuck E Cheese discussion (and Matt's input that we in Canada didn't have quite the same horrifying experiences as Americans!).

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

I didn't have any Simpsons episodes on VHS as a kid in the 90s, but my family's computer had a CD-ROM drive, and if there was any software that we owned that even SLIGHTLY resembled a game, I was sure to sink hours into playing it. One piece of software we owned was the 1995 PC "game" 'Sting: All This Time', which was kind of like 'Myst', except instead of solving puzzles, you collected tarot cards by listening to Sting dryly talk about his work and influences. I would spend 95% of my time watching an included 150px-width video clip from "Radio Bart" of Sting talking with Krusty and singing "We're Sending Our Love down the Well" over and over again. Before the Simpsons DVDs came out, this was the closest thing I had to being able to watch a Simpsons episode whenever I wanted.

Like Grandpa Simpson and his SS check "I didn't earn it, I don't need it, but if they miss one payment I'll raise hell."

Derek Detzler

We didn't even have a Chuck E. Cheese wannabe when I was an 80s/90s kid. In my neck of the woods, "food" and "entertainment" were almost always in separate venues. (I think the reason had to do with smoking and drinking laws). Most of the laser tag, mini putt, bowling alley, etc. places didn't have party rooms. And if they did, parents had to supply their own pizza and cake. McDonald's and Pizza Hut definitely hosted parties, but the only video games involved would be a single machine crammed into the entrance cubicle next to the payphone.

Dave Dalrymple

The nominated R&S episode was "Black Hole"/"Stimpy's Invention". Always a black cloud around Ren and Stimpy...

Thad Komorowski

My family loves Claymation Christmas Celebration, so my aunt rented the Easter one for us once (probably also like 20 years ago), and I think we lasted like ten minutes. I don’t remember anything except “pig dresses like rabbit” and “bad.”

Kat Heagberg

Growing up in rural Vermont, I not only never went to a Chuck E. Cheese's, I had no idea what it even was. I would see/hear characters on TV mention going to "Chucky Cheeses" (which is how I heard it, which I guess is accurate to the punny name) and just be baffled in what in the Hell that even was. I genuinely thought it was some sort of cheese store. But what we did have near me (well, about an hour away, as best you can hope for in my small town) was Pizza Putt. As the name implies, it was a pizza place with a mini golf/putt putt course. And like the old-style of Chuck E. Cheese's, there was also pitchers of cheap, stale, beer for the parents. The kicker, though, was that it was an INDOOR mini golf course. Most of the obstacles were shoddily made chicken-wire and plaster monstrosities made to look like landmarks such as Mount Rushmore, the Eiffel Tower, Niagra Falls, etc... What's fun about indoor mini golf is that you can smash the ball as hard as you want, and instead of losing your ball off the course, it just ricochets off all the walls, echoing in the entire building. Most games usually devolved into competitions of who can get the most ricochets, or can get a ball stuck high up on a piece of the building's frame. They also had an arcade full of both regular games and ticket-style machines like Skee-Ball. They even eventually added some indoor laser-tag and indoor bumper-cars as my friends and I aged into teenagers, and we actually kept going through most of high school since, again, nothing to do in a rural area. Especially since it was notoriously easy to sneak yourself a beer. Even if all of the waitstaff were properly carding (a rarity,) all you had to do was find a booth with a pitcher of beer where the parents had gotten up to check on their kids and snag it. A few years ago, it finally shut down, and me and a couple friends did one last round of indoor mini-golf before they closed for good...and for the first time ever, we actually drank some beer in there legally.

Andrew Bouvier

Whenever I sign up for a business’s loyalty program, I enter my birthday as a month or two from the current date. They never verify your birthdate, they just scan the coupon, so that way I get free treats throughout the year.

Sabrina

I have a memory, that I now doubt was real, where this episode was marketed as a more serious "very special episode" where Bart is in real, life or death trouble after falling in the well.

This commentary prompted me to buy the Claymation Easter tape from Salvation Army like, 20 years ago and it still hasn't made it into my VCR.

Erin Hardy

As a 7-8 year old in the early 2000s I actually got a Mr. Microphone for Christmas after seeing it advertised on TV, so maybe it was one of those cyclical things that they try to sell to a new generation of kids every decade or so. It never worked properly and was always a mess of feedback, so I definitely felt validated when I eventually saw this episode and realized they were making fun of it (at least for the first part). Also, there were eventually Chuck E Cheese's in Canada by the time I was growing up, though like most things in life, they never came to Quebec and I only got to go when visiting my cousins in Toronto.

Samwise

My Chuck E Cheese's memories are all from the late 80s. My grandmother would sometimes drive my great grandparents up to visit my family and it was my great grandparents that always wanted to take us out to lunch to Chuck E Cheese's. They would not entertain anything else because it's what we liked and they just liked seeing us have fun (when we visited them, it was always McDonald's). We always ate our pizza in the birthday room because my sister was terrified of the animatronic Elvis impersonator in the regular room, which I believe was a lion. That pizza was terrible, but we didn't care since we got to play in the ball pit and so forth. There was also a Toys R Us next door which was some fantastic placement. Later on, I think in 92, I would go to my last Chuck E Cheese birthday party for a friend and it's a memorable one because we pumped tokens into The Simpsons arcade game until finally beating it. I was the last to arrive so I had to play as Marge, but jokes on all of the rest, because Marge's vacuum rocks! Sometime in the later 90s I was invited over a friend's house (coincidentally, the same one from the previous paragraph) for a birthday party and I remember my mom refusing to just give out cash or gift cards as presents. We had to get something, but this was probably for an 11 or 12 year old so toys were out, CDs and video games in, but my mom wasn't going to get something with a parental advisory and she wasn't springing for a video game so we wandered around TRU and she eventually settled on a Mr. Microphone-like device. I didn't think it was terrible, so I had to be the Homer at the birthday party trying to convince my friend it wasn't that bad of a gift, but he was very much in Bart-mode. In hindsight, it was better than the gift he gave me (or would give me if my timeline is messed up) which was a weasel ball that his dad literally grabbed last minute on the way over to my house.

Joe Hodgson

I feel like this episode taught my entire generation that we must go out and get what's coming to us on our birthdays. Do I actually want my birthday lunch to consist of a free chipotle burrito and latte from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf? Of course I don't, but I must go get what's coming to me, because those birthday freebies won't be there tomorrow.

Kat Heagberg

And the B plot of "Bart's Friend Falls in Love" was driven by Lisa saying to herself "that could be Dad!" Watching a lot of TV really was a hallmark of the Jean/Reiss run.

Dave Dalrymple

I like how both this ep and Lisa the Beauty Queen are driven by Homer seeing a TV commercial and saying to himself "that could be Bart/Lisa!"

Neil Harris