Since airing, this episode has developed a reputation online as the moment the show officially began its downward slide. This is in large part thanks to the third-act twist, which reveals that horse-riding jockeys are actually brain-eating elves. That sounds dumb, but it’s actually worse in the episode.
This half-hour of The Simpsons also includes a lot of weird, out-of-place meta jokes commenting on how “Saddlesore Galactica” is repeating old storylines and jokes, which isn’t very funny and also just highlights how bad the episode actually is. While I think the show has had great episodes and even seasons after this point—even if many people online think otherwise—I can’t deny that “Saddlesore Galactica” is likely the end of the show’s golden era.
It’s very easy to look back on the last 25 years of The Simpsons and write it off as being rubbish because, well, for the most part it has been exactly that. But sometimes, like the sun shining through for an hour between passing storms, it can still get its shit together, and the upcoming tribute to Death Note looks like one of those rare occasions.
It’s part of the show’s next Treehouse of Horror Halloween compilation, and will give The Simpsons a full anime makeover for one of the episode’s instalments. You can see it in action in this short video below, which introduces Lisa as the recipient of the Death Note (or, as it’s called here, the Death Tome):
Some screenshots have also been released, giving us a good look at anime Homer and Marge as well:
Smart light it up Can display up to 57 colors at one time, have an incredible range of combinations, can react to your music, be shaped as you like using the segments, and work with most voice assistants.
Image: The Simpsons
Image: The Simpsons
If your first thought was “wow, that looks a lot better than I was expecting”, you are not alone! But there’s a very good reason this looks so authentic to the source material: this segment has been animated by Korean studio DR Movie, who have a long history of helping out behind the scenes on various American and Japanese properties, ranging from The Animatrix to Justice League to, most importantly in this case, the Death Note anime series itself.
The episode will air on October 30, and will be the second of three segments. The other two will be a Babadook homage starring Marge and a Westworld parody. Which is weird, given The Simpsons has already done a Westworld thing, one that lasted an entire episode and is one of the series’ all-time greats, but I guess 1994 was long enough ago (and the modern HBO series so different) that they feel like they can do it all over again and newer viewers won’t even notice.
