XVI (Season 17, Episode 4, Aired November 6th, 2005)
Clearly, the writers were tired of the World Series forcing them into November, given the opening is one giant take that against it. The jokes in it are salty, but pretty funny, with an especially good ending where the entire universe is sucked into the hole (a result of Kang and Kodos speeding up the game), and the title just being a sticky note with red pen.
“BI Bartificial Intelligence” sits in the comfortable Simpsons territory of Kubrick parodies, in this case “AI Artificial Intelligence” (which he started, but didn’t finish, leaving Steven Spielberg to do the job). It’s a Simpsons-fied version of that film’s narrative (or at least the first half of it), with Bart in the jealous other kid role. Not really much to say, but I was never really a fan of AI, and I did enjoy the jokes in this, and I did like that they did make the plot darker and more comedic by extending Bart’s pettiness and having him just destroy his new robot friends to exact vengeance (also cutting both his replacement and Homer in half in an easy decision). The ending parodying The Exorcist is weird and random enough to get a chuckle from me.
“Survival of the Fattest” is a parody of the 1924 Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game” and its 1932 adaptation directed by Merian C. Cooper. I’m surprised it took so long for them to parody it with Mr. Burns in the Zaroff role. Again, it’s mostly just the plot of that story with Simpsons characters, but the gags work, including one…
