I’ve seen this in syndication lots of times, and they leave it in. I always thought where they cut was after the librarian walks away from the desk. I expected someone to come over to yell at Homer.
Remembered another one:
In the episode where Homer eats the Guatemalan Insanity Peppers, while he’s tripping they cut out several smaller segments of what the townsfolk look like, including some segments of his walk out in the desert. Rough.
From here:
What I want to know is: how much EXTRA commercial time could they possibly need? And why are they allowed to have so much more in syndication?
Can anybody explain the difference in regulations? (sorry if it’s too much of a hijack)
I HATE when they do that. Naturally of course, right now I can’t recall specific cuts, but I’ve seen many episodes where I was expecting something to happen and it didn’t.
I wonder if it’s just Fox that does it. I remember they used to do it to MASH too. An episode I knew would suddenly be missing a short scene. Hell, sometimes it was as much as a couple of minutes and the cut was really obvious.
Cheap bastards.
No, other studios do it as well. The most obvious non-Simpsons to me was in the final episode of Seinfeld, in which the four are put on trial for all of their antics over the course of the series. The syndicated version removes the Bubble Boy’s testimony, even though Geraldo Rivera still refers to it later on in the show.
One of my favorite Simpson’s moments was cut out in syndication. I thought I must have dreamed it (like SkittleBrau) since it wasn’t there when I saw the episode again. But thanks to ArchiveGuy’s link, I found it again:
Homer and co-worker Mindy are on a business trip together.