DARK KNIGHT COURT

The Simpsons

Season 24 (2013)

I’ve written before about the scarcity of Easter-themed TV episodes, but luckily The Simpsons has been around for so long that the show has gifted us with not just one Easter episode, but multiple ones (okay, well, at least two that I’m aware of).  Up until now I’d never seen “Dark Knight Court,” for as a Simpsons purist I stick to the first 11 seasons or so.  I was pleasantly surprised by the first five minutes, and then the rest of the (Easter-less) episode was a reminder of why the show has mostly lost its charms.

But let’s start with the good stuff!  We get a nice burst of not only Easter but St. Patrick’s Day right off the bat, as we zoom into the sky during the familiar opening credits and the Easter Bunny and a Leprechaun suddenly appear, battling it out and then exploding in a burst of Easter eggs and shamrocks.  Presumably this is because the episode aired during a year when Easter fell in March, which is a terrible, horrible, no good thing.  I resent March Easters on so many levels.  For one, if Easter comes in March we’re left with an almost holiday-less April (save for April Fool’s Day), thereby rendering the entire month of April useless and boring.  Also, as someone with a late March birthday, I’ve had to endure a couple birthday-Easter combos and I am not a fan.  Every holiday and birthday should gets it due!  Easter I love you (my third favorite holiday!) but stick to April where you belong.  End of rant.

Anyhoo, after the leprechaun and bunny battle there’s a Jesus-related chalkboard gag AND an Easter egg couch gag in the opening credits.  This is full-tilt holiday theming and I was loving it!  After the credits we open on the Springfield town square in the throes of an Easter celebration. The women are strolling around in their lavish Easter bonnets (Marge’s hat features framed photos of the Simpson kids).  There’s a giant, melting chocolate bunny.  There’s even a lovely rendition of the song “Easter Parade” playing, and later an instrumental version of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” courtesy of the Springfield Elementary band.  One of the best gags involves Moe slinking into a coin-operated booth for a “Peep Show” only to discover it’s just a bunch of candy Peeps lined up for display.

It’s the kind of holiday episode I live for, only everything sadly comes to a crashing halt after the band blows eggs out of their instruments, pelting the crowd and bringing the festivities to an end.  With that, the Easter theme disappears and the episode quickly goes off the rails.  The two storylines involve Lisa defending Bart, the accused prankster, and Mr. Burns being a superhero named Fruit Bat Man. Sigh. 

And because this is a late-in-life Simpsons episode, of course there must be a celebrity guest star.  In this case it’s a surprisingly classy one: Janet Reno, who presides as judge of the kid courtroom.  I really like Janet Reno but she can’t save this episode from suffocating under its own goofy premise.  It’s shame because the opening Easter scene was really charming, but it feels tacked on to an otherwise hodgepodge of an episode.  Plus, what law says we must always have both an A and a B story?!  I could have so done without the whole Mr. Burns-as-superhero silliness.

Easter Quotient: A 5 for the first 5 minutes; 1 thereafter

Own It, See It, Skip It?: Definitely watch the opening five minutes for a dose of Easter fun, then quickly shut off your TV.

WALT DISNEY PRESENTS: I CAPTURED THE KING OF THE LEPRECHAUNS

Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People is must-see St. Patrick’s Day fare for a lot of folks.  Disney fanatic I may be, but Darby has never a particular favorite of mine (I’m more of a Gnome Mobile person, if given a choice between little people-themed live action 60s Disney movies).  So rather than write about Darby itself, I instead elected to watch and review this episode of Walt Disney Presents (a show also known over its long run as Disneyland, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, The Wonderful World of Disney and so on and so on).  Turner Classic Movies recently re-aired this special about the making of the Darby film as part of their “Treasures From the Disney Vault” series.  It stars Walt Disney himself and is essentially an hour-long commercial for the Darby film framed as Walt’s trip to Ireland in search of leprechauns for his movie because he’s told “only a leprechaun can play a leprechaun.”

Let's head back to 1959, when this special aired, a time when people still threw around the word "midgets" and smoked a lot onscreen. The episode begins with Walt getting a pep talk from Irish-American actor Pat O’Brien.  Pat struts around a very late 50s-looking living room, smoking a pipe and extolling the virtues of Irish men (“and a few women, too” he says rather begrudgingly).  It’s Pat that urges Walt to fly to Ireland in search of real leprechauns.  Once in Ireland (he arrives via stock footage of an airplane), Walt consults with an Irish librarian who shows him a suit of miniature clothes and gives him a dose of Irish mythology.  Then Walt is off to a local village, where he next teams up with actor Albert Sharpe, in character as Darby O’Gill himself.  

Walt and Darby hang out in some fog-shrouded ruins where they eventually encounter some leprechauns and demand to meet the leprechaun king.  They hang out in the king’s throne room, do some fiddling, and King Brian agrees to lend Walt all the leprechauns he needs for his movie.  Walt then heads back to the states for another confab with Pat O’Brien, who this time smokes a giant cigar instead of a pipe (I can only assume Pat O’Brien died of lung cancer).  We’re then treated to a series of clips and scenes introducing the characters from Darby O’Gill, including a neat sequence with a ghostly banshee and a spectral horse and carriage.

I have to admit all of the above was a bit less than compelling.  It was neat to see Walt Disney playing a version of himself. As Leonard Maltin said in his introduction, it’s interesting to see a living, breathing Walt here who’s not just a brand, which is more the version I grew up with.  Certainly this was chockfull of vintage 60s goodness (the living room décor was especially delightful).  But since everything revolves around Darby, which again is not a particular favorite of mine, I wasn’t exactly enthralled by the proceedings.  Add in Pat O’Brien’s long stretches of pontificating and smoking and the fact that this hour-long special is almost as long as the movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People itself, and you’ve got a curious relic of TV days gone by.  

This special may have been a bit of a snoozer (and, since it was in black and white, lacking the vibrant green hues one hopes for in a St. Patrick’s Day special), but it’s a fitting tribute to Walt Disney’s seemingly boundless imagination as well as his incredible marketing savvy—only Uncle Walt could so cleverly disguise a commercial for family entertainment as family entertainment, and manage to promote so many things at once: his movies, Disneyland, and even himself.