I thought it was a pretty good episode. The gist of it was that Lisa was researching the Simpson family tree and had a hard time finding anyone who was good and not just adequate or downright evil.
My favorite joke was when Homer told Lisa about the family motto: quit while you’re ahead. They then showed a cross-stitched sign that Marge made that read “quit while you’re ahea”. The ad for the self-winding yo-based toy was also hilarious.
What happened to the Simpson’s proud Hitachi heritage? 
Maybe it’s just me, but that was the first episode I’ve seen in a long time that didn’t get me to even crack a smile.
It’s just you. That was a truly excellent episode.
“Hey, I’ve got it. You could march to Selma. And tell her she’s ugly!”
Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think there was something wrong with The Simpsons.
Besides the Mesoamerican head and the Mr Plow jacket, what else was in the attic?
That episode was an old rerun. The new episode was The Color Yellow.
I don’t even want to think about how much trouble it must have been to get that head into the attic.
I saw Homer’s space suit (Deep Space Homer), the model rocket that demolished the church (She of Little Faith), a Grammy and a copy of “Bigger than Jesus” by the Bee Sharps (Homer’s Barbershop Quartet), Funzo (Grift of the Magi), a Princess Penelope Doll (Once Upon a Time in Springfield), Bart’s guitar (The Otto Show), the Golem (Treehouse of Horror XVII), an umbrella (Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala[annoyed grunt]cious, maybe) Homer’s talking astrolabe ('Tis the Fifteenth Season), and Homer’s half-finished robot (Homer the Moe). I would like to think the blue chair is the Spinemelter 2000 (Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?), but I’m not sure. I think I missed a few things, like the ice skates and one item that looks like a red poster with Marge on it, but that’s most of them.
Anyway, and not just because of that freeze frame gag, I loved this episode. I loved finding out some more about Simpson family history (shades of Lisa the Simpson) and the various unsavory people and losers in the family tree. And of course, if Grampa was correct that the Simpsons are related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, they might be partially Jewish as well as part black.
I thought Col. Burns was hilarious. It actually makes it funnier that C.M. Burns’ father was a slaveowning Southern colonel - and a rather old man in 1860 - while his grandfather ran an old timey atom mill. And of course it’s always weird when these characters are all related to each other in the past, but I’ll chalk that up to Lisa imagining that the Hiram Simpson family looked like her own.
I also liked that even though this was a Lisa episode, the Marge character was the heroine at the end. It made more sense and it made for a change from the usual formula of these episodes. I figured she was going to end up with Virgil, but it very much worked in the story. (I also really bought into Lisa’s need to have a heroic ancestor, although her condemnation of Eliza was harsh - Eliza was 10 and did as much as she could to help Virgil.)
All that said, I think my favorite gag was the possum/opossum thing, culminating in Hiram’s line “Ah can’t believe ah buttoned mah britches fer this.” And then he walks away and either unbuttons his britches, or we see he never buttoned them in the first place. I also noticed that the archive film showed that Eliza Simpson married the blind Milford Van Houten. I guess he was not that disgusted by her actions after he went blind. :smack:
Honest Abe. 
tee hee
It was an obvious attempt to mock the fact that now that Mr Obama is president, it’s cool to be black or at least part black. Unfortunately by making the Simpsons, black (partially) the writers fell into the trap they were trying to mock.
So this means the the writer(s) didn’t know what they were doing and it wasn’t an attempt to mock it, or they did mock it and were too stupid to realize they didn’t do it correctly.
Either way with thousands of storylines yet to be done (see any Simpsons fan site for list of potential plots that would be much better than this), the writers have yet again shown they have to rely on taking the Simpsons out of everyday life and putting them in a fantasy.
That is OK for the Treehouse of Horror line, but if the writers are so out of ideas perhaps they should look at getting new writers who can think of some original plots.
We’ve already had an episode where Lisa is disapointed in her relations when she had the “stupid” Simpson gene, and that was done well. So what we have is a weak attempt to copy that and combine it with a Halloween show type of “non-canonical” that doesn’t go anywhere.
“I’m just laughing to fit in. I still don’t get it.” - Groundskeeper Willie after the “My Kia!” gag.
Isn’t Abe a war hero? Seems to me Lisa didn’t need to look far for a heroic Simpson.
i have no idea what you’re talking about. also, i’m chuckling at the fact that you referred to Obama as “Mr.” rather than “President.” Watch fox news much? for the record, i’m a conservative.
in addition to Marley’s list, i saw a “I didn’t do it” tshirt (bart gets famous), homer’s bear suit (the fat and the furriest), and there’s an indian skull ontop of the meso-head from the original treehouse of horror sketch that parodies poultergeist.
Well, this episode suggests he may have leaked the Normandy plans to the Germans. 
“Now??” Black people have been seen as cooler than white people (at least by suburban whites) for decades. If you don’t believe me, explain the popularity of the blues, rock and roll, jazz, and hip hop. You could say Obama benefited from this but it didn’t come from him at all.
This episode did have the show’s first overt reference to Obama, though. Homer made some comments about suing “that jackass Joe Biden” a couple of episodes ago, but they hadn’t mentioned him by name until now. Unless you count this comment from Lisa:
“Look, we all care about quintile disparity, but the Democrats can’t win with another prissy brainiac!” (That’s from E Pluribus Wiggum, which first aired on January 6, 2008 - meaning at the time the show was written, he was arguably not well known enough to get a specific joke.)
Abe’s a war hero in some episodes and definitely not a hero in some others. In this episode he started giving away information about D-Day when Homer turned the thermostat down! And it must be very hard for the family to know when he’s telling the truth and when he’s being senile.
Let’s not go there, alright?
In Little Big Girl, Homer claims that his great great grandmother is a Native American.
Not a very good episode. The backstory never really gelled (though it was interesting that Abe Lincoln showed up in Springfield) and the jokes were mostly second-class. Nothing really sticks in my mind.
Didn’t like the episode at all.
I thought the plot was poorly executed. If they wanted a “Simpsons in the past” episode then make it in the past with a little bit of present, I thought they had too much of both, and not enough of either. The jokes were OK, but again I go to the fact that they already had an episode about this (Stupid gene) and that distracted me too much.
Again with the bad plot, I even thought the cohesiveness of the plot was bad. The diary-to-Milhouse line was ok, but then having Burns there, and then Grandpa magically remembering stuff. Just seemed stupid to me.
Final note: This is the second episode in a row that new information was said. Last week it was Marge being left handed, this week the black ancestry.
i didn’t notice the theremin, i was disapointed