The leaves are turning, the air is crisp, it could only mean one thing: the time is now for the best Simpsons episode of the year, The Treehouse of Horror Halloween Special. They’ve done a good job this year of building buzz, especially around the portion of the episode that spoofs Mad Men. The episode airs Sunday, November 2, and 8 pm on Fox.
In the above video we get a glimpse of the segment’s title, How to Get Ahead in Dead-Vertising. This is fantastic news: it means that the piece will be properly ghoulish, and it also means that it may not be only an homage to Mad Men, but also to the classic 1989 advertising satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising. In that film, a successful ad executive suffers from a horrible boil on his neck. One day he wakes to find that the boil has developed into a face, which becomes his evil alter-ego. I would love to see that scenario played out with Homer on the Madison Avenue of the 1960’s.
This also gets to the point of why The Simpsons Halloween episodes are always the best: there are way more movie references than usual. I was an obsessive Simpsons fan as a kid, and the Halloween episodes alone upped my pop culture literacy by several notches. The segment based on The Shining is a favorite of mine, and the Frankenstein spoof where Mr. Burns’ head ends up grafted on Homer’s shoulder gave me nightmares for weeks.
Brad Pitt will produce and may star in an outer space version of The Odyssey for Warner Bros., and the studio is looking to sign George Miller as director. It is indeed an interesting project for Pitt since he also starred in Troy, which was kind of an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad. But even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first Odyssey in space movie announced this week. On Monday, Ridley Scott described his next project as “The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner.”
Pitt may also play Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (labeled one of the “New Einsteins” in the latest Mental_Floss) in an adaptation of the nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game from screenwriter Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada).
Star Wars geek Kevin Smith is at last making his own sci-fi movie, a father-son comedy set in outer space that “will reference other sci-fi movies.” Hopefully it will be as good as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest, but looking at both the history of sci-fi comedies and the Bluntman and Chronic stuff at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back leaves me thinking it will be more 2001: A Space Travesty.
It’s that time of the year when studios decide if their Oscar hopefuls are ready or not. Dimension is currently weighing the possibility of The Road being pushed to 2009, and now Paramount has announced that expected contender The Soloist won’t be released until March while Defiance will barely make the calendar cut with a limited drop on December 31.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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