Rome-old and Juli-eh
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"Rome-old and Juli-eh" is the 15th episode of The Simpsons' eighteenth season, which was originally broadcast on March 11, 2007. It was written by Daniel Chun, and directed by Nancy Kruse. Jane Kaczmarek guest starred as her recurring character, Judge Constance Harm.
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[edit] Plot
Homer Simpson surprises the family with a newly decorated basement, now a rec room with a pinball machine, a ping-pong table and other luxury items, prompting his wife Marge to ask how Homer could afford all this. He says he has a plan and in the next scene files for bankruptcy before Judge Constance Harm, believing that this will save him from paying his debts. Unfortunately, Judge Harm tells him that the bankruptcy laws have changed and under the new laws, he has to pay everything back. When looking though the family's expenses, Homer decides to save a lot of money by moving his father out of the retirement home and having him live with the family. The rec room now doubles as Grampa's room.
One night Homer and Marge go out, and they ask Abe to babysit. Not entirely trusting Abe's competence as a babysitter, Marge also asks her sister Selma Bouvier to come over and watch Abe watch the kids. During the evening, Abe and Selma end up kissing and eventually fall in love with each other, and are unaware that they are caught by Homer, much to his dismay (Ahh! A bear is eating grampa!), as he wants his dad to end up old and lonely. Abe previously dated Selma's mother Jacqueline Bouvier in "Lady Bouvier's Lover". As is the case in this episode, Marge is happy with the arrangement while Homer is not. Patty is no happier than Homer and she enlists his help to break them up. Patty impersonates Selma and Homer dresses up as "Esteban de la Sexface", a Spanish lover-type, and the two arrange for Abe to catch them kissing. Their plan is foiled though, when the actual Selma comes by and catches them. Angry at being manipulated, Abe proposes to Selma. She accepts; they are married and move in together.
With Abe unable to find work, Selma is the sole breadwinner in the family, working hard in her new, more stressful job as department manager at the DMV. Abe, meanwhile, destroys their kitchen with his ignorance of how things work by misusing the appliances, causing a kitchen fire. This makes Selma realize that maybe love is not everything you need after all, and she dances with him one last time. They presumably divorce with Abe moving back to the retirement home and Selma moving back to her and Patty's room at Spinster Arms Apartments.
Kicked out of the rec room, Bart and Lisa order a lot of complimentary shipping boxes from the A.S.S. (American Shipping Services, not afilliated with the human ass), getting the idea from Ned Flanders, and builds a fort out of them. When the Sarcastic Man becomes angry and asks for them back, they refuse, whereupon he threatens to come back and get them by force. Bart and Lisa think he is bluffing, but in fact he comes back with an army of delivery men and women. Bart and Lisa put up a brave fight, first by releasing a barrage of cardboard tubes to trip the enemies, then using cardboard squares to throw like shuriken. The delivery men and women set up a siege ladder and Lisa wraps the lead man in tape and pushes the ladder down. They are aided by Nelson, who arrives unexpectedly to aid Lisa, who could have been hit by a barrage of cardboard arrows. He dives down with twin cardboard tubes and fends off a large number of delivery men and women, while one of the enemies flies overhead, upon a giant, red Fell Beast.
The army swarms while Bart uses a cardboard tube to shoot down enemies with bricks, beehives, egg cartons and Snowball II. The A.S.S. legion fails and flees, but the kids immediately lose interest in their fort and melt it with the garden hose.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title of this episode is a pun on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
- The battle sequence with Bart, Lisa, and the box salesmen uses The Fields of the Pelennor, a portion of the score from the The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and the scene itself is a parody of the Battle of the Hornburg from The Two Towers and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. One of the A.S.S. delivery men even flies a Fell beast like the Nazgûl.
- Lisa calls the box fort Boxingham Palace, a reference to Buckingham Palace.
- Before the attack of the delivery men, Bart says, "Who knew guys in brown shirts could cause so much trouble?" -- a reference to the SA of the German Nazi party in the 1930s, who were known as "brownshirts."
- The basement where Grampa is living looks very similar to the one in King Of Queens where Arthur lives.
- The tape Grampa unwittingly burns in the microwave oven is a copy of Sands of Iwo Jima.
[edit] Reception
This episode drew 8.98 million viewers on its first broadcast on Fox.[citation needed]
[edit] External links
