Here’s Every Pop Culture Changing Moment From ‘The Simpsons’ Most Influential Episode
It’s been 30 years since The Simpsons premiered its most iconic episode that Matt Groening ever publicly disowned, and pop culture is still saying the quiet part out loud.
On March 5, 1995, Fox aired an episode of The Simpsons against the wishes of the show’s creator that would go down as one of the most referenced, quoted and influential episodes of any comedy show in TV history. “A Star Is Burns,” a crossover episode featuring the main character from Simpsons OGs Al Jean and Mike Reiss’ short-lived animated sitcom The Critic, premiered amidst a public catfight between Groening, The Simpsons and The Critic executive producer James L. Brooks and Fox itself. The network denied Groening’s request to pull “A Star Is Burns” from broadcast over what he considered to be a lack of integrity and shameless cross-promotion on the part of his colleagues and their side project, but Fox did allow Groening to remove his usual “created by” and “developed by” credits from the opening sequence.
Despite the behind-the-scenes and in-the-headlines drama that threatened to overshadow “A Star Is Burns,” the controversy surrounding the Simpsons episode about Springfield’s first film festival has shrunk into the footnotes of TV history while the jokes, quotes and phrases invented by the episode’s writer Ken Keeler live on in the lexicon of American pop culture.
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To celebrate the 30th anniversary of “A Star Is Burns,” Simpsons superfan (and Cracked contributor) Neil Arsenty, who runs the popular Simpsons history account @dailysimpsons on Twitter, broke down how the bits, quotes and quiet parts of the episode continue to pop up in unrelated parts of pop culture to this day:
Unfortunately for Jean, Reiss and Brooks (and undoubtedly to Groening’s petty schadenfreude), The Critic would air its final episode less than three months after Jon Lovitz’ character Jay Sherman declared that “Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre.” As for Arsenty’s hope that Groening has changed his tune on “A Star Is Burns” in the years since Fox canned The Critic and the crossover proved to be Jay Sherman’s magnum opus, Groening held the grudge for at least a couple more years after the controversy, as he abstained from contributing to the DVD commentary for “A Star Is Burns” when the similarly controversial Season Six DVD box set released in 2005 with all its infamously shaped packaging.
Nevertheless, Groening’s protestations failed to stop “A Star Is Burns” from becoming one of the show’s most acclaimed episodes ever, and its impact continues to be felt in non-Simpsons-related Twitter threads across the internet. And, though a decade may not have softened Groening’s stance on the crossover, there’s always time for him to change his mind and decide that he was actually saying “boo-urns” after all.
