So the gist is, Homer meets God, who tells Homer that he has six months left to live. Six months later, we have the clip show episode where Bart’s prank puts Homer in a coma.
The theory is that Homer never woke from that coma, and the rest of the series is him dreaming, which explains the shift from a show with normal family plotlines to a show with more zany stories.
I’m curious to see others’ thoughts on this.
Honestly, it just seems like after-the-fact fanwanking vs anything the writers consciously intended, similar to the whole “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is just a fevered dream of Cameron’s.
Don’t go David Lynch on me.
Theories like this are always fun, but my guess is that it wouldn’t be hard to find a reference to some post-1993 event in the many, many episodes since the first season. (Of course, the theory could then explain this by saying that the event was mentioned by someone at Homer’s bedside and it somehow filtered through…)
I don’t see what this brings to the viewing experience. It doesn’t sound like he’s seriously suggesting that the writers did this intentionally, so all it’s doing is attempting to explain why the Simpsons got zanier over the years, when the real explanation is that simple, family-oriented stories don’t keep a series going for 25+ years. It’s not like the zany stories are a problem that need to be solved; surely, it’s a feature, not a bug, and the writers’ subtle (and sometimes not subtle) peeks through the fourth wall have been some of the funniest moments. “The Simpsonse are going to ______” became a rallying cry of absurdity, even if (in this fan’s opinion) it also marked the beginning of the descent into mediocrity. Explaining it away as Homer’s crazy ideas as opposed to simply the writers’ crazy ideas doesn’t do anything for me, and would probably make me appreciate it less.
Oh, in that case, my answer is more like this. I don’t really expect rigid continuity in the Simpsons universe, and it doesn’t add to my viewing experience imagining the post-coma series as just being all in Homer’s head. The show just evolved and changed over time, like most shows. There’s no need to have a cohesive theory to explain it.
In the Season 2 episode “Bart Gets Hit By a Car,” Bart gets hit by a car (duh) and has a vision of himself meeting Satan in Hell. But he ends up back on Earth after Satan realizes his own error:
Does this theory mean that Bart actually died in 1996?
No, because, obviously, the omnipotent Satan misspoke. Clearly a century had not passed since Satan’s utterance and the Yankees winning the pennant. He meant to say “The Cubs.” No way he’d consciously choose the team who’d won the pennant most frequently. As it is, the Cubs have not won and Bart is still alive.
The huge, gaping hole in the theory is that dying isn’t the same thing as being in a vegetative coma.
“Baby on Board” (where Homer won a Grammy for his hit song with his barbershop quartet) predates this. So does “Monorail.” We were already well into Zanyville.
It is cool that Homer went into a coma on April 1, almost exactly 6 months after the October 8 “Heretic” ep.
Obviously, the omnipotent God misspoke.
You’re right about Monorail. The Baby on Board episode came later, though. I know the part where Homer wins the Grammy predates the coma, but Homer telling his kids about it does not, so it would just be Homer dreaming of making up this story.
I’m not really defending the theory, I just wanted to see what others thought. I believe the show became zany because the writers began to run out of ideas.
The current events issue just flat out kills this. How does Homer in a coma know about Elon Musk? What he looks/talks like? What his deal is?
There are hundreds (thousands?) of such references in the show. From a guest appearance by 'N Sync to two mentions of The Backstreet Boys and everywhere in-between.
Yvan Eht Nioj.
I dismiss this even as a wacky theory because for me, The Simpsons didn’t degrade fully into bad zaniness (instead of smart satire) until sometime after the tenth or twelfth season or so in the early 2000s…
For me the turning point was somewhere around '96 or '97 or so. Whatever season it was that had Homer eating that hot chile pepper and hallucinating–that’s when it got pretty damned weird. They did seem to reel it back a little the next few seasons, though, but my memory of that season while it was occurring was that the Simpsons was getting really odd.
You couldn’t fanwank your mother on the fanwankest day of your life if you had a electrified fanwanking machine.
You post better than you fanwank.
Never mind- missed Simpson’s reference.
D’oh!