There is some speculation over whether the cartoon, "Get A Horse!" is new-but-made-to-look old, or if it's an abandoned short from back in the day that Disney decided to finish decades later (like 2003's Destino). The late Walt Disney is apparently voicing Mickey once again. Maybe he's finally being unfrozen??

MacMullan is a wonderful director who gained some notoriety amongst Simpsons fansites for her unique visual flair, and one of many Simpsons directors to have made the jump to Disney. I vaguely remember seeing a short piece she did for MTV featuring vintage-looking cartoon characters (which I can't find a video of), so it's good to know things have come full circle for her.

[Jim Hill Media]

First, he tackled the obvious question, whether or not he's ever seen Dan Castelleneta choke Nancy Cartwright to get the Homer-strangling-Bart scenes just right:

i have never witnessed it, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to prove that it has happened.

In a rather shocking development, it turns out he still likes the show that pays him millions of dollars each year:

mostly i'm too close to the show and love doing it so much to have an objective opinion. i do what i've always done, which is show up and enjoy making what they've written come to life. the show still really makes me laugh. i've certainly seen online over the years, and elsewhere, people criticizing the show. it reminds me of the beatles anthology. there's this section where people are talking about how the white album isn't so good...that it was too long and that a lot of the tracks didn't work, and you see various people saying it wasn't up to snuff. and then, they cut to paul mccartney who says "yeah, i've heard people don't like the white album, but i say it's the bloody beatles white album. it's fucking great." that's kind of how i feel about the show.

Panda rape & talking rags? Same thing as the White Album, basically.

it was a chance meeting. i very early in my career did the voice of a cartoon dog called Hollywood Dog for a Fox pilot that failed miserably but i got the audition for the simpsons based on that. and the rest is history.

Hollywood Dog was a really dopey comic strip by the late R.P. Overmyer. The show, which I can't find video of, was supposed to be like Roger Rabbit, with "Hollywood Dog" as a cartoon character interacting with real people. In a bleak alternate universe, it was picked up instead of The Simpsons. Truly the darkest timeline.

Asked whether there are things he'd consider too extreme for Moe's character:

it's an interesting question because you don't want to commit "character assassination" and do something you feel your character would never do; however, a lot of the fun of Moe and many of the simpsons characters is that over time they get more and more outrageous. i think as long as it's funny it's ok.

I guess the obvious comparison to make is to Harry Shearer, who was pretty vocally opposed to messing around with Principal Skinner's background.

Also, Azaria briefly touched on when the voice actors are contractually allowed to use their voices, which I kinda wondered about during Cartwrightgate:

i can definitely use them in public on talk shows and appearances, etc. i can't go on another show as moe or apu doing scripted stuff, getting animated, unless we get approval from 99 lawyers which we will never get.

Finally, one of the cutest celebrity couple stories I've ever heard:

almost every role that you lose out on, especially early in your career, you're kind of devastated by. my ex-wife once, when i was particularly heartbroken over a role i lost, took me by hand to the video store (when they still existed) and pointed out how many roles in many many different movies she didn't get that she was sure, at the time, would have made her a huge star. and i swear that 99% of those movies and roles were all silly, and major disappointments. after that, i really put that kind of thing in perspective and didn't worry about it too much.

Some other tidbits:

• He doesn't like doing Luigi's voice, and his young son "barely tolerates" his voices.
• He likes that he can phone it in from anywhere.
• His favorite episode is Cape Feare, and his favorite joke is when Sideshow Bob steps on rakes.
• He was heartbroken about not getting the chance to voice Dracula.
• He's only only made out with Matt Groening once.
• He desperately wanted to be Joey on Friends. He did manage to become a recurring guest star, though.
• He blames Godzilla for nearly killng his career.
• He hates the show Herman's Head, in which he co-starred with Yeardley Smith.
• He naively thought his red backpack would shield him from creeps recognizing him.
• Some guy mistakenly thought he was in Workaholics.
• Another guy asked him how much money he makes per episode which is rude as hell and he declined to answer.
• thunderdome13 wanted to know if Azaria ever boned on his couch. Thankfully, he did not answer.
• baolee asked about his penis and did get an answer. Good for him.
• Someone was kind enough to finally ask about the charity thing he was there to promote.

[Reddit via No Homers Club]

Well, Fox isn't having any of that. A guy from their parent company News Corp. is straight up threatening to take the Fox network off the air and have it become a cable company if Aereo is allowed to continue operating:

"We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content," Carey said. "This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can't sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that's our only recourse."

...he said, twirling his whimsical mustache evilly. Does News Corp. train its executives to sound like supervillians or does it come naturally to them?

This move would leave millions of viewers who watch via antenna (many of them economically disadvantaged) deprived of their favorite Fox shows like The Cleveland Show and The Following. If the other networks follow Fox's lead, this could mean The End of Television As We Know It.

In a weird twist, Aereo is backed by Barry Diller, the founder of the Fox network who the evil corporate plutocrat Mr. Burns is partially based on. Is he a bad enough dude to bring down the very network he created??? Only time will tell.... [Bloomberg]

It's a change of pace for Groening, who's usually the one playing legal offense.

Vale: Matt Groening's lawyers demanded that you destroy the "Binky" issue and send proof of destruction, right?

NT: Not only that, they demanded that an apology be printed in a "prominent place" in the next issue of Bunnyhop, with text that had to be approved by them first! We ended up decapitating Binky's head from the covers and mailing 300 of them in a bag to the lawyers. I wrote a cold, minimal apology--and anyone with a keen eye could recognize a little sarcasm in it. The whole experience was incredibly disheartening.

The kerfuffle led to Groening becoming something of a pariah in the zine scene. He defended himself to Mother Jones on the eve of Futurama's premiere:

I have a great deal of sympathy for the zine community and the First Amendment and I'm member of the ACLU and all that [...] The problem, unfortunately, with the way things are set up -- I have no problem with Bunnyhop, but if I don't vigorously pursue my copyright then other people can steal it. I'm probably one of the most bootlegged cartoonists in the world. Unfortunately that's the nature of the business -- you have to vigorously pursue copyright infringement wherever you see it.

Also of note: there was a 1998 issue of Simpsons Comics that was essentially a big advertisement for CBLDF, with Homer and the Comic Book Guy getting into a wacky legal predicament. What has Batman ever done to protect the rights of comic book readers? [Digital Spy]

In a Season 13 episode, the Springfield court imposes a total ban on sugar. A giant bonfire is built to burn all the sugary treats in Springfield, and some police officers attempt to throw a pile of Butterfingers onto the blaze. As they hit the fire, though, a sort of force field surrounds them, and they're thrown back, unburned. "Not even the fire wants them," Chief Wiggums notes ruefully.

A later episode, Half-Decent Proposal, featured the chalkboard gag "I will not bite the hand that feeds me Butterfingers," indicating Butterfinger was unhappy with the joke and made their displeasure known.

And so, for over a decade, Bart Simpson never so much as laid a finger on a crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery Butterfinger. Spokespeople including Seth Green, Lou "Iron Man" Ferrigno, and Jaime Pressly were brought in as replacements for Bart, but things just weren't the same. Could those two bar-crossed brands ever reconcile and form a new advertising partnership?

Bart Simpson reunites with @butterfinger in Nestle's "Nobody Better Lay A Finger" campaign. Follow the reunion on Twitter! #LoveAtFirstBite

YES, hence the existence of this post! They've set aside their differences to prey on consumers' lingering Simpsons nostalgia, just in time for Butterfinger's "90ish" anniversary and The Simpsons's 50th! Everybody's happy, except for this guy:

Why exactly Nestle USA wants to reconnect with a property that hasn't been funny or relevant since even before the company severed all ties with the once great sitcom is a mystery. Especially considering that it's rumored - by the fan community, at least- that The Simpsons will end next year at season 25.

At risk of sounding like a corporate shill, I find the old Butterfinger commercials sort of a fascinating, underlooked part of the Simpsons oeuvre. They tended to use a lot of neat, zippy camera movements and angles that rarely occured in the series. Here's a compilation:

Fellow Simpsons writer Mike Scully broke the news yesterday afternoon on Twitter. Executive producer Al Jean issued a statement saying Payne was "beloved in the 'Simpsons' community and his untimely passing is terrible news to us all."

Back in the 90s, Payne and Frink wrote for sitcoms like Veronica's Closet, Men Behaving Badly and a bunch of unproduced pilots before they were both brought in to The Simpsons in 2000. Together they wrote the Simpsons episodes "Insane Clown Poppy," "Bye Bye Nerdie," "Simpsons Tall Tales," and "The Bart Wants What It Wants." They ended their writing partnership a few years later on amicable terms. Payne's solo Simpsons credits include "Thank God It's Doomsday" and "Fraudcast News," the latter of which earned him a special Paul Selvin Award from the Writers Guild of America. In 2007, he gave the Star-News ten reasons why he loved working on The Simpsons, including "We can do jokes about socialism and Homer's butt catching on fire."

Rather than be constrained to writing television, Payne managed to achieve his childhood dreams of conquering Hollywood and writing boffo blockbusters. A lifelong comics fanboy, his first credited movie was the superhero spoof My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which later led to him co-writing the Marvel films Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Thor, and its upcoming sequel Thor: The Dark World. According to a 2011 interview, he had an idea for his own comic that he was keen to do if he could ever find the time between his Simpsons and film duties.

He is survived by his wife and three young children. [Wilmington Star-News]

Check it out - we're the apartment above the one in question. tmz.com/2013/03/22/ash... via @tmz

— Tim Long (@mrtimlong) March 23, 2013

Ugh, people in Hollywood are always shamelessly bragging about which celebrities have nearly killed them.

Apparently his apartment suffered some smoke damage and will need to be worked on. He's currently staying in a hotel, as he assured a concerned fan. Hopefully the damage isn't too bad and he didn't lose anything important, 'cuz that would really suck.

On the bright side, there will finally be an interesting story in the Simpson writers' room tomorrow.

[No Homers Club]

Simon had been strongly hinting at the diagnosis for a while on Twitter: last month, he tweeted a photo of his medications, including one for chemotherapy, as well as a photo of all the "medical" marijuana people have been giving him.

Simon, of course, played an enormous role in forming the tone and voice of The Simpsons as it evolved into a series.

The new plan, Simpson-Bowles 2: Escape from Necron 7, goes even further than the original plan in reducing the nation's deficit. While the original had a semblance of balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, the new plan is much more heavily tilted towards extreme austerity (which mostly involves cuts from Medicare and Medicaid), thanks in large part to the deficit hawkish Simpson, who once called Social Security "a milk cow with 310 million tits."

The plan is also supposed to somehow serve as an "outline for a new grand bargain" between Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact even Bowles thinks the idea of a grand bargain is "at best on life support."

Critics are calling the sequel "lame," "vague," "unbalanced," and "a waste of everyone's time."

[Salon]

The stuff about his tenure on The Simpsons is interesting - he had the choice of doing either that or Coach (I wonder what the inevitable "Craig T. Nelson gets leprosy" episode would've been like), met Conan right before he got sucked away by NBC, and rose from being a 1-day college dropout intimidated by the Ivy League-infested writers' room to running it just a few years later.

He also lectures a bit about the importance of putting characters before jokes, which is a little galling coming from the guy who brought us panda rape and jockey elves. But he does give an apology, of sorts:

It's funny going back and doing these DVD commentaries 10 years later. You get a chance to relive every bad decision you made. There are times when you wish you could fast-forward the DVD and just say, "Sorry folks, I don't know what I was thinking on that one."

Finally, some closure. [Splitsider]