Pretty amazing that this one was released in less than six months of the Eighth Season, probably for last-minute Christmas shopping. Now we’ll be jonsing for the Tenth by the time it appears in the Summer of 2007 with the Bart cover.
The Ninth season is a landmark for the show for several reasons:
- The Oakley & Weinstein period ends but they still supervised three episodes (there are always shows bumped back due to time or development), one of them is also the episode Groening publicly admits to calling his least favorite
- The Mike Scully period begins and his episodes tended to push the “reality envelope” of the show into the ridiculous. However, I still think the show is great because no live-action program could ever achieve what animation does.
- The show breaks the 200 barrier with “Trash of the Titans” (a personal favorite thanks to Steve Martin’s appearance).
- There are also two shows guided by Al Jean’s team and two from David Mirkin (Oakley & Weinstein’s predecessor).
Commentaries continue to be winners with this series but I’m disappointed over Groening showing up on fewer as the seasons progress. The only guest this time is Jay Leno on “The Last Temptation of Krust” and he exudes the old Jay I always liked as an actor and comedian, not the sycophantic host of The Tonight Show. There may be hope for him yet. The regular voice actors Dan, Nancy, Yeardley and Hank appear from time to time too. I figured Harry is too busy but no idea about Julie. They almost get the elusive writer John Swartzwelder to speak on the phone (he’s the one writer that refuses to do commentaries even though he has written more episodes than anyone else).
Not much in the features department this time. Three Butterfinger commercials in the US and two from Australia for some kind of chips. Thankfully the characters’ voices aren’t tweaked for an Aussie accent. The foreign language segment focuses on the 200th episode and only Polish is disappointing because there’s just a male voice translating over the ongoing English dialog. Japanese, French, German, et al. are more fun because you hear the personalities in those languages yet I can’t a understand a thing they’re saying, except for the smidgens of French.
As expected, this is an automatic purchase for fans but still highly recommended with everyone else. These episodes made their debut between the Fall of 1997 to the Spring of 1998 and many of them were played to death through syndication recently. They’re still worth revisiting since two minutes of all shows are shaved off for additional commercials when they’re syndicated. Half of the episodes also have deleted scenes that were cut for time and never because Fox’s censors told them, one department the show gets to happily ignore. With me of course, I bought it immediately for my completist nature yet I have loved the show ever since the Christmas Special in 1989 (I didn’t really catch much of Tracey Ullman) and I hope to bring my nephews and nieces up to speed on what they missed before they were born.11