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We welcome on podcaster/comedy writer Mark Malkoff--check out his great show The Carson Podcast--for the landmark episode of Homer growing back his hair. We chat about dream assistants in Hollywood, old SNL sketches, non-canon Burns history, and MORE. So listen to this week's podcast, live from Hair City, Utah!

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Comments

Joe Hodgson

I see and hear your characterization of Karl as a magic gay man, but I never read him like that. I always thought he was a commentary on ineffective executives who are no more qualified, and sometimes even less qualified, than their peers working in lower stations. They're only as good as their assistants, who have to do more than their fair share of work to prop some jerk up. "Bart Gets an F" was a perfect way to premier Season Two, this episode is a bit more bold. I can remember watching it as a kid and being a little bored with it. There was enough going on to keep me stimulated via the need to ask my parents a question every scene, it felt like, as there was a lot I didn't understand as a 6 year old. When Bart came into the picture with the beard gag I can remember a rush of excitement, though then I felt almost guilty when Bart's arrival resulted in Homer being reduced to tears. That scene of Homer dragging his hair through the spilled hair tonic is so good and it's stuck with me. As an adult, I think this episode is fine, the melodrama of the score is a bit much and that ending doesn't work for me, but Harvey Fierstein is terrific. It's a shame we really have no reason to catch-up with Karl again, because Fierstein's voice is so distinct I don't know that he could ever play a different character.

Lockerus

God that chewing and walking foley. There’s some noises you really don’t need that much fidelity on. As a person who has been balding since 28 and went through a period of denial, there is no magic hair potion, at least not one available to people who aren’t apartheid wealth billionaires. It’s tough, but best just to accept it and start buzzing.

mavrick

I believe homer adds a syllable or two phonetically, depending on how you pronounce it

Kat Heagberg

I’ve had to go through Agile Development training this month. I live on the West Coast, and it’s on East Coast time, which means I’ve been having to get up at 3:45 in the morning. It’s been rough. During a 5-minute break this morning, I decide to pop in my earbuds and continue listening to my favorite podcast. I tune in right at the point where Henry and Bob bring up the Toyota Production System (for those lucky enough to not know, Agile strategy is basically based on the Toyota Production System). My sleep-deprived, corporate-jargon addled brain briefly wonders if my boss put Bob and Henry up to this. Still, an enjoyable episode. I’m really loving the season 2 revisit.

Byron Lagrone

Huge fan of kanban / making work visible / similar work schemes. The only way to do software imo

Alternity

That lush executive washroom scene filled my childhood imagination.

Parker Thompson

That hair clinic really screwed Homer by forcing him to buy a 6 month supply. If he was able to buy 1 month it would only be like $160

ryan

From looking at the Wikipedia page for Dumont network, it looks like its flagship stations in New York went on to form a cornerstone of the Fox Network: WTTG and New York's WABD (later WNEW-TV, and now WNYW) survived as Metromedia-owned independents until 1986, when they were purchased by the News Corporation to form the nucleus of the new Fox television network. Clarke Ingram, who maintained a DuMont memorial site, has suggested that Fox can be considered a revival, or at least a linear descendant, of DuMont.

Bradford A Barker

Highly recommended: the most recent episode of SRSLY Wrong is about the Simpsons, and the last 2.5 minutes is a really good skit about modern Simpsons.

Andrew Bouvier

My theory on Smithers accepting that Karl committed the fraud was that Smithers knows Homer from before he was an executive and knows that he's very stupid, and might not think Homer was literally capable of pulling off that scheme. The timing still doesn't work out since Karl isn't Homer's assistant until after he has hair, but maybe Smithers wasn't looking too hard at the dates on the insurance forms.

Sarah

My new head canon is that Smithers and Karl definitely have a history with each other.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

It really is interesting to me that they had a very clearly gay-coded character played by a famously out gay actor in such an early episode, but then would deal with queerness so sparsely outside of jokes with Smithers until Homer's Phobia. Of course by then the canon had been tinkered with several times, but that episode does sort of recast Homer as much more homophobic than he is here, though you could easily make the argument he's too dumb to understand that Karl is a gay man. Either way, this kind of representation in a mainstream American show in 1990 was pretty damn ahead of its time and it's aged pretty well.

Stephen C. Nedell

Sigh....like Burns I was fated to go from a rich head of luxurious hair to chrome dome status in my late 20s. Unlike them, I took it gracefully and have shaved my head for the past 18 years or so. The secretary candidates making kissy face was a part of a whole trope from 70s TV and hubby/secretary shenanigans. There was even a game show called Three's a Crowd from 1979, a Newlywed Game type show but with the wife the husband and husband's secretary, with all the implications that the husband is schtupping the secretary that it sounds like it would have. Being older than you guys, I remember watching an episode when it first aired with a question being what was the husband's favorite outfit for the secretary to wear to work. If I remember the wife guessed right... a sweater with no bra. My six year old brain thought gross, but strangely compelling. Yes I watched way too much TV then....I actually though Jack and Chrissy were my real parents.