Talking Simpsons - Mountain Of Madness With Luke Savage

Kimball and Dawson are also Green Acres references. Hank Kimball and Eb Dawson. I blame Nick at Nite and TV Land for this knowledge.

Brian Hortin

Henry shoudn't feel bad for being excited about the Special Edition's new effects. A lot of people were. And honestly, some of them were good. The Death Star battle in the Special Edition of A New Hope is genuinely more exciting with the CGI than in the original version, which hasn't aged well.

Stew Shearer

Really surprised “Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter,” wasn’t line of the show. It is definitely the episode line with the longest afterlife!

Mike Mariano

Beyond horrified at Henry's implied verdict that the Marx brothers aren't memorable!? Come on, they're great! The critic David Thomson wrote in his kind of pretentious but also brilliant style about them, capturing them perfectly: "These deliberately ill-fitting brothers are the first demonstration in movies of private, protesting anarchy within the rational state. Long before our tentative reaching out for the madman hero, the Marx Brothers made it clear that madness was not heroic or noble, not even a martyrdom, but a helpless, self-destructive liberty. Their anarchy is useless, withering, and sad; they dominate events only by exaggerating their own privacy until it becomes manic, antisocial, and ridiculous. There have been attempts to argue that the brothers stand up for the little man, for eccentricity, and against pomp, formality, and respectability. On the contrary, I think they relentlessly estrange themselves from audiences. Of course, they make us laugh, like the professional comedians they always were. But they are not interested in us. Chaplin hypnotizes us, Keaton calls to us through his utter deadpan, but the Marx Brothers are as fiercely preoccupied as the inmates of psychiatric wards spinning nonexistent webs. Except for Groucho. He is the most human, the one who serves as an unreliable go-between for us and the mad duo, Harpo and Chico, and the one who knows he is trapped and that we are watching him. He alone admits, with lacerating scorn, to emotions. Women and money move him, but so hopelessly that he has been compelled to make a comic persona out of lechery and money-grubbing: here is the American boy—intact in the work of Griffith—so ashamed of the mockery that greets his aspirations to romance and prosperity that he has had to distort them. It is no accident that Groucho’s confessional confidence trickster bestrides the Wall Street crash, nor that his frigid lecher looks in retrospect like the brother of Gaston Modot in Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, an idealist warped by the system."

Hampus Bystrom

Kimball I just thought was another Green acres reference, and more of a lead in to the obvious one

Boomer Spacely

It's Dave Thomas playing a "contest winner" until they realize the improv isn't working and drop it.

Bob Mackey

Didn't this episode have the kind of bizarre commentary with a "contest winner"? It's been a while since I've heard it.

By jove, it was~!

Alex Irish

It was?? I’ll have to re-listen

Alex Irish

I thought that we mentioned it was Dave Thomas playing a character?

Bob Mackey

Googling Kimbal & Dawson comes up with a neighborhood/bus route in Chicago... maybe that's all the reference is?

Tom

Yup, 'The Autograph Hound'. The Ritz Brothers were animated by Ward Kimball in particular

Alex Irish

While Zach Ryan mentions on the "Mysterious Voyage" episode how that commentary sucks, I'm surprised you didn't carry that sentiment to this episode. I avoid the commentary on Mountain of Madness like the plague, for this is the one with an elderly contest winner who stands up early on who they have to tell him to sit back down and it's so awkward I just wanna barf.

Alex Irish

Holy shit, Henry. You unlocked a long forgotten memory of mine with that "he wants an autograph" cartoon reference.

littleterr0r

In my head "Mountain of Madness" was the Powersauce/Murderhorn episode. I completely forgot about *this* mountain-based episode, but it's all coming back to me now. Can't wait to listen :)

Nina C.

The best I could theorize about Kimble and Dawson is Richard Kimble (from the fugitive) and Richard Dawson (family feud) and so together they are a pair of Dicks. Bit of a stretch but it's all I got ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Darren Hinchy

That Dawson and Kimball comment sent me down an internet rabbit hole. The best I could come up with for the Kimball portion was Billy Kimball, another Harvard grad in television comedy who once wrote for Army Man magazine with many Simpsons writers, including Swartzwelder. He was also chummy with and sometimes categorized as a rival to Conan O'Brien and interestingly enough would eventually write for The Simpsons well after this episode aired. As for the Dawson, nothing really promising. Best I could do was the famed Richard Dawson who acted in Hogan's Heroes but is likely best-remembered as the host of Family Feud. Kimball did host a game show of his own, the short-lived Comedy Central show Clash!, so unless there was some inside joke about comparing him to Dawson I can't see that being it. Someone get on Twitter and ask Oakley!

Joe Hodgson