"Funeral for a Fiend" | |
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The Simpsons episode | |
![]() Sideshow Bob's "funeral" with his brother Cecil, their father and Krusty the Clown. | |
Episode no. | Season 19 Episode 8 |
Directed by | Rob Oliver |
Written by | Michael Price |
Production code | KABF01 |
Original air date | November 25, 2007 |
Guest appearances | |
Kelsey Grammer as Sideshow Bob David Hyde Pierce as Cecil Terwilliger John Mahoney as Doctor Robert Terwilliger Sr. Keith Olbermann as himself | |
Episode features | |
Couch gag | A magician walks into the empty living room and uses his cape to make the couch and the family appear from thin air. |
Commentary | Matt Groening Al Jean Michael Price Matt Selman Tom Gammill Max Pross David Silverman |
"Funeral for a Fiend" is the eighth episode of the nineteenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons . It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 25, 2007. It was written by Michael Price and was directed by Rob Oliver. Serving as a stand-alone sequel to "The Italian Bob", it features Kelsey Grammer in his tenth appearance as Sideshow Bob, as well as David Hyde Pierce in his second appearance as Cecil Terwilliger. John Mahoney makes his sole appearance as their father, Doctor Robert Terwilliger Sr.. Keith Olbermann also makes a guest appearance as himself. [1]
The Simpsons see a commercial for a new restaurant called Wes Doobner's World Famous Family Style Rib Huts, owned by a cowboy of the same name and perfectly suited to each member of the family. They decide to visit it for its grand opening, but discover Doobner is actually Sideshow Bob, having fled Italy alongside his wife and son, Francesca, and Gino, and created the restaurant and its commercial to lure the Simpsons into a trap. After tying up the Simpsons, Bob then reveals a stack of dynamite-filled crates, with which he will kill them, using a laptop with a defective battery as a detonator once it overheats and explodes. While gloating, Bob incorrectly quotes a phrase from Macbeth and Lisa corrects him. Bob tries to look up the correct phrase on Wikipedia, but the laptop explodes in Bob's hands and he is then arrested and taken to court.
During Bob's trial, his father, Doctor Robert Terwilliger Sr., is brought to testify. He explains Bob has a rare heart condition and also suggests that Bob is insane because of his long-standing feud with Bart. Since all of the audience have been tormented by Bart's pranks, Bob convinces Springfield Bart is ultimately to blame and they all turn on him. As Bart pleads his innocence, Bob takes out a vial labeled nitroglycerin, which everyone thinks is a deadly explosive. However, as Bart throws the vial away to save everyone, it is revealed to actually be Bob's heart medication as he collapses to the floor and is pronounced dead.
Bob's entire family attends the funeral: his mother, Dame Judith Onderdonk, a well-known Shakespearean actress; his father; his brother Cecil, who has been let out of prison for the occasion; and Francesca and Gino, along with many regular Springfieldians. Feeling slightly guilty, Bart speaks to Cecil, who convinces him to go to the funeral home to make peace with Bob before he is cremated. However, when Bart arrives, Bob rises out of the coffin, alive and well, and traps Bart in it to be incinerated.
Meanwhile, Milhouse inadvertently makes Lisa realize that everything was an elaborate plot put together by Bob and his family: with his mother being a Shakespearean actress, Bob would have known Shakespeare too well to have accidentally made a misquotation and must have done so intentionally in order to get caught and go to trial, where his father used a special drug to put him in a death-like state. Cecil helped by playing to Bart's guilty conscience and encouraging him to visit Bob, luring Bart into the villain's clutches once again. The Simpsons race to the funeral home and just barely manage to save Bart in time as the police then arrive and arrest the Terwilligers. Defeated but curious, Bob questions Lisa on how she was able to figure out his plot – she became suspicious when she noticed that Bob's coffin had been custom-made to fit his feet and points out that his family likely would not have bothered paying for something like that if he was actually dead. The Terwilligers are then incarcerated with Bob's cellmate, Snake Jailbird, who constantly torments them while their son goes insane over fantasizing about exacting his revenge one day.
The scene where Homer blocks Marge from getting Bart out of the coffin, telling her, "He has got to get over his fear of coffins," is derived from the opening scene from "Tennis the Menace" where Bart gets trapped in a coffin and starts to panic. Homer watches him panic on a closed circuit TV. The joke was written for The Simpsons Movie , in a scene that was cut from the final release of the movie, and reused here. [2]
John Mahoney is the third Frasier cast member to play a member of the Terwilliger family, after Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, his on-screen sons in both shows.
The song Krusty sings at Bob's "funeral" is a take-off on "Candle in the Wind" by Elton John. The title of the episode is also an allusion to the Elton John song "Funeral for a Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)", the preceding song to "Candle in the Wind" on the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road .
The Terwilligers seal Bart in Bob's spacious coffin and turn on the conveyor belt to the cremation furnace in an attempt to incinerate him, in reference to Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd doing the same to James Bond in the film adaptation of Diamonds Are Forever .
An estimated 9.0 million viewers tuned into the episode. [3]
Robert Canning of IGN gave the episode a 6.2/10, saying, "There were some enjoyable scenes, but the half hour lacked in the number of laugh-out-loud moments, and Bob's ultimate scheme wasn't very surprising." [4] The website later placed the episode at #9 on the list of "the Top 10 Sideshow Bob Episodes", with Canning stating that it "returned Bob to his path of vengeance, and that's really the only factor that pushes this episode above its predecessor. Even with a return to what we know, this is still one of the weakest Sideshow Bob episodes. One major aspect of this episode is that it reunited the Crane family from Frasier . [...] While this could have been comedy gold, The Simpsons wasted the opportunity. Instead of keeping the familiar dynamics these actors had shared before (a tactic that worked extremely well in Cecil's first appearance), the series took a different route, making Mahoney's father character just as uppity and snobbish as his animated sons. Add an excessively elaborate, unfunny plot to kill Bart and ‘Funeral for a Fiend’ failed to capture any of the early seasons' Sideshow Bob magic." [5]
Richard Keller of AOL TV said, "While Pierce and Mahoney did have their moments it was all Grammer this episode as a Sideshow Bob coming apart at the seams." He went on to say, "For the most part this week's episode was entertaining. Plus, it also brought a bit of continuity into the show, something that comes and goes on the program." [6]
Genevieve Koski of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B+, praising the appearance of Pierce and Mahoney as Cecil and Dr. Terwilliger post-Fraiser, but criticized the TiVo storyline at the beginning, and wondered "if Lisa's recap of Sideshow Bob's plot was meant to be an homage to "Black Widower," when Bart recapped Bob's plan to kill Selma. If it was, it was half-assed; if it wasn't, it was a pleasant bit of unintentional nostalgia." [7]
Robert Underdunk Terwilliger Jr., PhD, better known as Sideshow Bob, is a recurring character in the animated television series The Simpsons. He is voiced by Kelsey Grammer and first appeared in the episode "The Telltale Head". Bob is a self-proclaimed genius who is a graduate of Yale University and a champion of high culture, including the adoption of a transatlantic accent, similar to that of Grammer's portrayal of Dr. Frasier Crane from the sitcoms Cheers and Frasier. He began his career as a sidekick on Krusty the Clown's television show, but after enduring constant abuse, Bob framed his employer for armed robbery in "Krusty Gets Busted", only to be foiled by Bart Simpson, and sent to prison. Bob started seeking revenge against Bart while in prison, and the two became feuding arch-enemies.
David Hyde Pierce is an American actor. For his portrayal of psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom Frasier from 1993 to 2004, he received four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series as well as two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Pierce has also received five Golden Globe Awards nominations for Best Supporting Actor for the role. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his role of Lt. Frank Cioffi in the Broadway musical Curtains (2007).
Charles John Mahoney was an English-American actor. He played retired police officer Martin Crane on the NBC sitcom Frasier from 1993 to 2004, receiving nominations for two Golden Globe Awards and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
"Cape Feare" is the second episode of the fifth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on October 7, 1993. The episode features guest star Kelsey Grammer in his third major appearance as Sideshow Bob, who attempts to kill Bart Simpson again after getting out of jail, spoofing the 1962 film Cape Fear and its 1991 remake. Both films are based on John D. MacDonald's 1957 novel The Executioners and allude to other horror films such as Psycho.
"Krusty Gets Busted" is the twelfth and penultimate episode of the first season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on April 29, 1990. The episode was written by Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky, and directed by Brad Bird. In the episode, Krusty the Clown is convicted of armed robbery of the Kwik-E-Mart and imprisoned. Convinced that Krusty has been framed, Bart and Lisa investigate the crime and learn that Krusty's sidekick, Sideshow Bob, is the culprit.
The Simpson family are the main fictional characters featured in the animated television series The Simpsons. The Simpsons are a nuclear family consisting of married couple Homer and Marge who were high school sweethearts and their three children, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. They live at 742 Evergreen Terrace in the fictional town of Springfield, United States, and they were created by cartoonist Matt Groening, who conceived the characters after his own family members, substituting "Bart" for his own name. The family debuted on Fox on April 19, 1987, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" and were later spun off into their own series, which debuted on Fox in the U.S. on December 17, 1989, and started airing in Winter 1989.
"Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" is the ninth episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on November 26, 1995. In this episode, Sideshow Bob attempts to rid Springfield of television by threatening to detonate an atomic bomb. When that backfires, he attempts to kill Bart once again, but this time along with Krusty the Clown.
"Day of the Jackanapes" is the thirteenth episode of the twelfth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 18, 2001. In the episode, Krusty announces his retirement due to interference from network executives and the growing popularity of the game show Me Wantee. When Krusty reveals that all of the episodes featuring Sideshow Bob have been erased, Bob decides to murder Bart again by hypnotizing him into murdering Krusty during his farewell show.
"Black Widower" is the twenty-first episode of the third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on April 9, 1992. The episode was written by Jon Vitti and directed by David Silverman. Kelsey Grammer guest starred as Sideshow Bob for the second time. In the episode, Sideshow Bob — Bart's new archenemy — returns, apparently in a romantic relationship with Bart's aunt Selma, but when Bart later realizes that Bob is planning to kill Selma, he prevents the attempted murder and Bob is sent back to prison. "Black Widower" finished 39th in Nielsen ratings for the week that it originally aired. Reviewers generally enjoyed the episode, and gave Grammer's portrayal of Sideshow Bob particular praise.
"Sideshow Bob Roberts" is the fifth episode of the sixth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on October 9, 1994. Kelsey Grammer returns in his fourth major appearance as Sideshow Bob, who, in this episode, wins the Springfield mayoral election through electoral fraud to get revenge on Bart. The episode received a favorable reception in the media, including a positive mention in I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide and Green Bay Press-Gazette. A review in Press & Sun-Bulletin placed the episode as the seventh best of the series.
"Brother from Another Series" is the sixteenth episode of the eighth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 23, 1997. Sideshow Bob is released from prison after his arrest in "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" into the care of his brother Cecil and claims to be a changed man. However, Bart does not believe him and tries to find out what Bob is up to. It was the first episode directed by Pete Michels and was written by Ken Keeler. The episode guest stars Kelsey Grammer in his sixth appearance as Sideshow Bob and David Hyde Pierce in his first appearance as Cecil. The title is not only a pun on the movie The Brother from Another Planet, but for the fact that guest stars Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce also played bickering brothers Frasier Crane and Niles Crane, respectively, on the NBC sitcom Frasier.
"The Italian Bob" is the eighth episode of the seventeenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on December 11, 2005. Serving as a sequel to "The Great Louse Detective", it features Kelsey Grammer in his ninth appearance as Sideshow Bob and is the first time the Simpsons visit Italy.
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