Rate/Review "Apocalypse Cow" (KABF10)

[Mike Scully]

When Bart joins the 4-H Club, he unexpectedly falls in love with a cow named Lou. But when Bart finds out that Lou has been sold to a slaughterhouse, he becomes determined to save him. Bart and Lisa free Lou from the slaughterhouse, and Bart gives the cow to Mary (voiced by Zooey Deschanel), a fellow 4-H Club member. However, Mary’s father mistakenly believes Bart is giving them the cow as a dowry for Mary’s hand in marriage. When Homer and Marge hear of Bart's engagement, they devise a plan to save Lou and free Bart from his marriage.

[NJ Pete]

whats with the shots at tress mcneal

[burnin']

those werent shots, they were acknowledgements i thought

[McClure]

Here are notes I made as the episode airs.

Semi-long opening, hopefully this means the episode isn't packed with filler, which has been a problem with the show as of late.

First act
Wow, that rabbit at the beginning of the act looked really weird.
Instead of this crappy clown/transformers show, why couldn't they have had an episode of Itchy & Scratchy? And it looks like I was wrong about the filler.
The segment with Bart driving the tractor was kind of long without much payoff, although the joke about the manure shooting out Pirates of the Caribean 3 DVDs.
Wait... I thought it was called the 5H club now...
Mary's voice sounds too old. She sounds like a 15 year old.
Wow, a montage that doesn't have some kind of pop culture song, that's something they don't do often.
Nice montage, but again it didn't have much of a payoff considering that it was a minute long.

So far, so good. They did an okay job of building Bart's relationship with Lou, but there wasn't much for laugh out loud moments. 3/5.

Second act
Oh great, another meta reference, this time for Tress MacNeiile. They took a great scene that started with Bart feeling bad with and ruined it by mentioning her.
This episode has some nice animation, well done Nancy Kruse.
Damn, her father is Cletus.
They missed a chance for a nice meta reference, they could have had Cletus dancing like Homer did when Lisa played a jug in Homer the Vigilante.

Overall, not a bad act. Again, not a lot of laughs, but some nice buildup, mixed in with some terrible jokes (Barry Bonds, the growth hormone thing). 3/5.


Third act
Damn, they are making Mary into a one-dimensional hick character like Cletus.
"We name all out kids after stuff that will happen to them. Ain't that right? Stabbed in Jail?" - Best line of the episode.
Dia-Betty is back. At least they use her sparingly, unlike the rest of Cletus' family.
Wow, that's the Plopper moment everyone was excited about?
It's nice to see Homer and Marge trying to help Bart like in the good ol' days.
"Laughter house", not bad, not bad.
It's Apu! Yay!
The marriage stuff kinda ended quickly and was replaced by the Homer/Marge savinf Bart thing.
And, of course, the inevitable "Don't have a cow man" reference.

Overall: 2.5/5. Not as bad as I thought it would be, but it didn't have a lot of laughs in it, and there were some pretty stupid things.

[erock]

shots at tress mcneill? I know that they mentioned her, I don't think they were shots.

it was a pretty decent episode.

[Stupid-Flanders]

5/5. Hilarious. Mary wasn't stupid. Bart had a cow, man. Homer was funny. The episode didn't feel rushed, nice sequence of events. Clown o Morphs or whatever was really funny, it made me spill bong water everywhere. Well, off to bed.

[McClure]

Does anyone know what the music at the end of the episode was a reference to?

[|Mr.Sparkle|]

That episode was surprisingly pretty good, I had really low expectations for another episode about Cletus, but I liked it. I really liked the animal rights idea.

Also does anyone know for sure what that 4-H Club was referencing towards? Cause the name and symbol kinda resemble 4Chan, but I find it very unlikely that the Simpsons would make a nod towards 4Chan. That's the 4Chan logo

[The Governor]

Does anyone know what the music at the end of the episode was a reference to?

I think it's from the "Beef, it's what's for dinner!" commercial.

Anyway, not a great, not a horrible episode, but it was somewhat boring except for the downright Hillarious "Ralph on a Sawhorse" sight gag.

Not feelin' writing a long review, but: 3/5 seems right.

[HappyPalooza]

3/5
It was alright. Homer was funny.

[JoshG]

Also does anyone know for sure what that 4-H Club was referencing towards? Cause the name and symbol kinda resemble 4Chan, but I find it very unlikely that the Simpsons would make a nod towards 4Chan.

It wasn't a reference. 4-H is a real thing (and has been for decades, hence the "It's still a thing" sign). Look it up.

[SilverEagle]

Wow. I love it when the Simpsons don't suck.

I really, really liked this episode. It was evenly-paced, had a good story, strong jokes, and was well animated. A couple of negative points:

1. The "joke" with the cow getting stuck in a tree was pointless.
2. Actually showing the entire sign during the "laughter house" bit was unnecessary and showed them once again over-explaining a joke.
3. Marge talking about turning on and off her cell phone has similar problems to point #2 and just felt unnatural.

Other than that, fantastic. Jeff Westbrook did a very good job.

4.5/5 rounded up

[Gatorgod]

I never got closure on Maggie's spinach eating problem,.. but no matter, I'll survive. Plenty of good combine laughs and cow caring. Too bad Nelsons lookalike cow didn't get saved also. I give this episode a 4/5

[Dave Shutton]

WOW, I was really surprised by this one. I really enjoyed it alot. There was pretty much no horrible embarrassing moments and the animation was flawless, probably the best of the season animations wise. Wow I gotta watch it again, to really remember alot of the jokes but from what I remember they were really clever and actually funny.

almost 5/5 but what new episodes these days really diserve that, so I gave it a 4/5

[|Mr.Sparkle|]

It wasn't a reference. It's a real thing. Look it up.

oh I just wiki searched it, lol.

Oh and just another note, I liked to see Plopper once again in an episode.

[Simpsons_Fanboy]

4/5

Fantastic. The episode was fairly well-rounded, had decent buildup, and didn't feel rushed at all. The episode had good meaning to it. I found the acknowledgements of Tress Macneille a bit humorous. Good characterization on Bart's part. The bits with Ralph were simply hilarious. I just didn't like the fact that they made Mary's father Cletus. Another shitload of redneck satire, which is IMO, very tiring. And was it really necessary to have the whole crisis with Homer at the end of the episode? I don't really think we needed closure on that. Overall, decent episode.

[Dave Shutton]

I liked the second Tress Macneille thing much more " Hey that sounds like Tress Macneille" such and obscure name.

And yeah what was with Plopper, is he just going ot show up randomly around town? Or was that just the animators slipping him in? It was like he was owned by that hillbilly.

[arii]

It was cute. I can't think of much else to say aside from that - it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't exactly anything special, but it was still very entertaining. Some jokes were absolutely terrible and some I actually laughed at.

It was nice to see them get into it, for the most part (aside from that absolutely retarded clown thing. Not funny and went on far too long) and to see Bart get some halfway decent development for caring for the cow, and even to have Mary introduced in fairly early on. It would've been better to see more than two scenes with her before Lisa brings her back up as "your friend" (we got all of that development with the cow, why not with her?) but at least it didn't feel forced when they resorted to her.

And it's really unfortunate that Mary seemed like more than a one-dimensional character before that wedding stuff, but then she just turned into a complete hick and that was unfortunate because it seemed like, at the beginning, they were actually hinting towards her having some character. The episode REALLY would have benefitted to spending more time on Mary and to not throw out what they got a good start on. Still. Cute. 4/5.

[grissom]

Wasn't terrible, wasn't great. The plot was pretty useless, but there were a couple of decent gags. C+

[I-CloWn-I]

the intro/couch gag was terrible...lik wtf is was that
and i was expecting homers escape from the "laughter house" to be alittle more drawn out then that
overall a B+

[al_fresco]

I can see your doodle, I'm with you.

In general an eh episode.

I do disagree in that Tress is one of my heroes and enjoyed the 'tip o the hat' to her. Thought one more ref would have pushed it into the absurd arena of Classic Simpsons. Beyond that a lot of the stuff was predictable.

Showing Bart headed toward the laundry then showing it folded...fmeh. It would have been better had we been made to guess why we were seeing blocks of folded clothes for a few seconds and then as the camera pulled back we see that Bart is running over clotheslines. The scene just lasted too long. The Pirates thing was funny as was the water, but the buildup took to long and I felt a bit insulted.

Apu was again predictable. Cletus et al were o.k. but the whole series of scenes about the wedding were so so. There was some humor there, but everything seemed to move slow and the payoff for the buildup was a letdown. A B-story may have made the episode better.

The ref to Casablanca was nice.

In general the episode seemed flat and slow with funny moments. My three is a result of 2 Tress refs. A two and a half without.

[hobbesup]

I'm very surprised on this one. 4/5. I laughed my ass off with the Manure=Pirates of Caribbean gag.

[lionelhutz123]

I really liked this episode, it wasn't lame and had some great jokes. I just was disappointed when they changed the joke of homer saying, "I will never eat meat again...for two weeks." to him listing the meats he will eat. I thought it would be a nice callback joke to the one in "lisa the iconoclast." overall decent episode, 4/5. By the way, were there any "apocalypse now" references?

[I-CloWn-I]

this episode was basically a series of random events