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Talking Simpsons - Saddlesore Galactica With Chris Cabin (Patreon)

Published:
2020-09-23 04:00:16
Imported:
2026-06
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We're joined by Chris Cabin from the podcast We Hate Movies as we wonder "should the Simpsons get a horse?" This is one of the show's most random episodes ever, with bad boy horses, Clinton being gross, and jockeys who are secretly murderous trolls! Is this an episode worth getting mad over like Comic Book Guy, or is it funny in its zany disregard for storytelling? Listen now or the jockeys might just eat your brains!

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Comments

DrKarate

This is it, this is the one I always point to as the decline of the simpsons. In highschool my best friend and I would always chat over AIM during the episodes, and I remember how absolutely shocked how "Family Guy, lol so random" this one was, between the elf jockeys, the self referencing humor or just constantly calling itself the "worst episode ever" but this always sticks out as, the worst episode ever. We still ended up chatting over episodes for a bit longer after this one, but I think the anti-escape orb in season 12 ultimately sealed that traditions fate.

crystalhearts

I'm absolutely with Bob here - early 2000 was an extremely dark time for me and for years I've mixed up my feelings there with my feelings of disappointment with this run of Simpsons episodes. These episodes aren't great but they've got their moments. I can't think of any TV show that was any good in season 11, anyway.

SlothIsLegend

Uh, “The Horse Whisperer” t’wasn’t a Cormac McCarthy book, Cabin. You’re thinking of “All the Pretty Horses” which was made into a forgettable movie starring Matt Damon. How dare you, sir.

Taskbaarchitect

One thing I've never understood about this episode is the title. Obviously it's a riff on Battlestar Galactica, but why? There are so many other horse / horse-racing puns that could be made, it makes me wonder if the "troll" jockeys were originally intended to be aliens at one point or another...

Bree Rody-Mantha

Bob, as an aspiring Canadian, I do think you should know about Randy Bachman’s weekly radio show! It airs Saturday nights on the CBC, our national broadcaster. It’s called Randy’s Vinyl Tap and it’s just Randy Bachman platings songs that fall within a particular theme — like one episode was songs for which people always get the title wrong (Baba O’Riley, Sympathy for the Devil). Between songs he just tells fun stories about people he toured with and noodles on his guitar. It’s basically the most dad energy you could possibly fit in a radio show.

Joe Hodgson

This episode isn't a good one. The random nature of it just strikes me as very vapid. It can be funny on the first viewing, but there's nothing to come back to. There's very little setup to the jokes and once your brain figures out they're just coming at you with random bits of laughs it stops working. This episode has the distinction in my brain of being the last episode of The Simpsons I can recall being discussed among my circle of friends before school the next day. We were all pretty surprised at how much the show was veering into South Park and Family Guy territory. The randomness was surprising, and if I'm being honest, it was a little exciting in the moment. Most of the comments shared though were just focused on the randomness though as I don't remember anyone actually professing they enjoyed it. And since we didn't speak much about the series going forward other than the occasional "Do you still watch The Simpsons?" I can only assume this was a jumping off point for many of my friends.

Kat Heagberg

If it makes you feel any better about Tim Long, I saw him at the “Stonecutters LA” trivia show a couple of times, and he was very interesting to listen to and nice to fans. I may be a little biased, though since he did vote for my fiancé and my pigeon rat costume in last year’s Halloween costume contest (I believe his exact words were “I guess I’ll take the pigeon rat.”) That said, if anyone insulted my fiancé’s profession on a DVD commentary, I’d probably hate them forever too.

Kris

Now I'm imagining Frank Welker and Jim Cummings making angry horse noises at eachother

Lockerus

I couldn’t find proof of it anymore, so this is probably apocryphal but I still can’t believe that Matt Groening actually likes this episode as a whole. It just seems to fly in the face of the rules he set down for The Simpsons. Edit: when will I learn, commenting before listening to the cast just doesn’t work!

crystalhearts

One thing I find displeasing about season 11 episodes is the music cues - the show's score has always been very emotional, which works when the stories have emotional depth. In episodes like this it comes across as insulting - how dare you think that I care whether Duncan the horse lives or dies, Clausen!

To Boldly Joe... Moore

Enjoyed the show, guys. Was definitely looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this one. ^_^ I almost feel like this whole episode was made on a dare or something. There really aren't too many other reasons I can think of for how it turned out this way. You can picture the writers sat in the office, pulling their hair out, trying to tie this crazy story together. It starts to get late and then someone notices that the last act is losing momentum. They need something to "raise the stakes". Somewhere, in a dark corner of the room, a suggestion is made. "The other jockeys threaten Homer to lose the race". Initially, the idea sounds workable. It's a competitive industry after all, and you could picture a similar scenario in real life. Just then, someone else interjects: "But why would all the jockeys band together? Aren't they all in competition with each other?" "Oh, uh, well... They have a secret pact or something." Again, everyone buys into the idea. So far, it's no more far-fetched than most episodes. Then someone suggests adding some flavour to the whole affair. "No, not just a secret pact... a secret society!" "Yeah, where they live like elves in a tree, with mushrooms and stuff!" "And they have pointy ears and sing songs!" The absurdity of the idea causes everyone to laugh. It's a concept so bizarre, it would never work in a normal Simpsons episode. Coming to their senses, the writers scrap the idea and go back to their blank page. More time passes, someone brings in coffee and after many chins are scratched, another voice finally mutters... "I think we had something with that elf thing." And the rest, as they say, is history. ^_^

DL MacDonald

Of course people state this is the decline, certainly they’re not off on that mark. I did hold out until Frank Grimes Jr ep where a joke actually made me turn off the TV. This episode is still a fav one of mine - I was a knight at Medieval Times so I got mileage out of the horse related quotes. My fav didn’t even make the episode where they bring Duncan to his first race where he’s been tied to the trailer hitch of the car. “You really think that horse can run a mile and a half?” - “He ran all the way here.” Now I’ll need to watch the ep to hear Jim Cummings as Duncan but he certainly didn’t do it all himself because the one clip of Duncan you did play was Dan doing the voice - specifically Homer and Duncan looking at Fillies. Speaking of a character having a different voice. The isolation of the Clinton clip made it painfully obvious that Hartman was not voicing him any longer. Is this the first time we’ve seen Clinton being voiced by someone else?

Robert Flaxman

They kept doing similar stuff to this in the future, not surprisingly. There’s an episode in a few seasons where Bart does 4H and wants to rescue a cow. Just take an old plot and change out one of the nouns! Perfect!

Alex Forsyth

I haven't watched Sliders in a while, but my memory of Professor Arturo's death was their was a military guy who had a disease where the only way he could survive was if he stole brain stem fluid from people and doing so put them in a persistent vegetative state and Arturo had his brain stem fluid stolen. They then had to chase him across several slides before the eventually stopped him. The first two seasons were so good. Sabrina Lloyd and Wade Welles were done dirty. Not only was she replaced, but her character was captured and sent to a Kromag breeding colony. Yep, her punishment for not getting along with the new producers and deciding to leave was having her character raped regularly for the rest of her life.

ChemyChems

I remember during reruns of this episode in my area sometimes they would cut the entire jockie-elf scene and song with a commercial break. So Homer walks into the room for that drink and then when coming back from break its him falling out of the back. So I guess even they knew that scene was disliked.

Christmas Ape

This is an episode I remember watching when it aired, and my reaction at the time being “Okay, sure”, but even then I think I was little surprised and amused at the meta quality of the Comic Book Guy jokes. A TV show commenting on itself in such a direct way was something very new to me. On another note: being from the same province as Randy Bachman means that I get to hear a lot from our “hometown hero”, even though he probably hasn't lived here in decades. While we've been constantly bombarded with The Guess Who and BTO on the radio—and also Bachman's holiday-themed self-parody “Takin' Care of Christmas”—he will mostly be known to me for the jokes my friends make about his CBC Radio show, where he tends to either play his own music or music by members of his family, and for the time he complained about Leonard Cohen getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame before he did.

Thad Komorowski

Sorry, guys, you were way too soft on this LOL. There's nothing wrong with sacrificing reality for comedy, as seen in the cited classic "Itchy & Scratchy Land", but you better have a damn good reason and *really* be funny when you do it. This episode is also a good example of how much the lame writing was driving everything by this point, with the kind of stuff animators HATE (songs, horses, crowds), so of course it's going to slide into stiff fatal blandness, even if it is competent. It's clear the animators were having more fun with the killer robots than anything here, since there was actually a point to it. And yeah, that audio commentary exposes what I've always suspected, that Matt Groening has no real taste. As was pointed out, this is literally a Family Guy episode, where you're constantly questioning the logic and noisome mean-spiritedness. An episode of this class would've gotten people fired in the show's heyday, though it seemed par for the course in this controversial season. Also, Henry, and only because you mentioned him a few times here, but I will make you lose any respect for Bruce Buffer with the following tidbit: he was the one who threw $10,000 to Cans Without Labels (John K. is an o.g. UFC fan).

twistedmentat

I rewatched this episode before listening to the pod and it struck me, if this was an American Dad episode it would fit perfectly. It has that surrealism and magical reality that AD often has in later seasons. Stan and Roger have Bart and Homer's plot, Steve has Lisa's plot, Francine and Marge are similarly forgotten about. It's not the worst, there are episodes that are worse than this, even in this season. I prefer it over Maude's death episode and the missionary episode. Comicbook Guy's apperance is almost certainly based on the fact that around this time Alt.rec.arts.tv.simpsons was taking off and there were simpsons writers on there and they probably got annoyed by some nerd criticizing something that they worked really hard on. I certainly remembered it being that.

Justen Brown

This is absolutely the episode where my friends and I silently distanced ourselves from The Simpsons as Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, South Park, and the fresh Malcom in the Middle just crushed everything in the aging Simpsons. I'm 5 years younger than you guys so this was an early period where I could critically judge this 10 year old show as feeling sufficiently old and stale because I was too young to have nostalgia from when the show was fresh. Night of the Dolphin was my official "this fucking sucks" pivot and I can't wait for y'alls opinion on Treehouse XI.

PurpleComet

This is a really funny episode right up to the moment the jockeys reveal themselves. I remember on the initial viewing I was too busy trying to process what was happening to even react to the jokes afterwards. It also set off a trend of a secret society or organization revealing themselves in the third act, something I noticed a lot in season 12. I wonder if the jockeys were ever referenced again, like one episode did with Armin Tamzarian. This episode wasn't enough to make me stop watching (I stopped around season 14), but I defended The Simpsons as a show that had a few good laughs every episode instead of the amazing show it had been seasons 3-9.

Dave Dalrymple
>>44865049

Yeah. At the time this episode aired, I thought it was one of the strongest they had done since season 8 (Land of Jockeys notwithstanding).