Synopsis
While buying new tires for his car, Homer meets a travel agent who offers Homer a free bus ride to the Super Bowl, as long as he can find enough people to fill the agent’s bus. A group of Springfield men tag along to what soon becomes a problematic trip after the tickets are discovered to be fake. As a result, they are locked in “Super Bowl Jail.” Thanks to help from Dolly Parton, they break out and attempt to find the football field, until they get lost in the sea of players that run through the corridors of the stadium to the locker room after winning the Super Bowl. Much to their happiness, Homer and his friends end up in the locker room with the players. Meanwhile, Marge and Lisa try to find the missing parts of “Vincent Price’s Egg Magic”, a celebrity-endorsed craft kit.
Guest stars: John Madden, Troy Aikman, Dan Marino, Pat Summerall, Rosey Grier, Fred Willard, Dolly Parton, and Rupert Murdoch.

Review
In one sense, it would have been appropriate if I’d gotten my shit together and posted this two days ago, on the day of the Super Bowl itself. In another, more meaningful way, it doesn’t matter, since (as the episode itself notes) there’s virtual no football. There’s also virtually no plot, no drama, no subtext – nothing but mostly cromulent gags. In the DVD commentary, Mike Scully joke the episode was “thrown together … without thought or structure,” and it’s not hard to see. It’s not actively bad in any way, but it feels lazy.

I feel lazy too, so I’m going to skip straight to the quotes and observations. Not sure what else there is to say, anyway.

Quotes and Observations

• Krusty: “Legends of comedy, my tuchus! What has Fatty Arbuckle done that I haven’t done?” (if you don’t understand this joke, look it up – but, uh, trigger warning)
       
• Postmaster: “These five digits tell us where to direct your mail.”
  Lisa: “But it’s nine digits now. What’s the point of these other four numbers?”
  Postmaster: “Those are citizen relocation codes. With any luck, we’ll never need ’em.”
   
• Marge: “Free foot pain analysis!”
  Homer: “Oh, Marge. That’s just a trick to get you in there so they can cure your foot pain.”
   
• There’s not much to it, but it’s cute and fully in character that Homer thinks “colonic” refers to a pina colada.
   
• “The road to the Super Bowl is long and pointless. I mean, when you think about it.”
   
• Coach: “Dang! That was my last quarterback. Now what am I gonna do? sees Homer in stands You!”
  Homer: “Me?”
  Coach: “Yeah, you. Get your hand off my wife’s leg!”
   
• Marge: “It’s so nice to have a peaceful weekend together.”
  Lisa: “Yeah, I’m bored too.”
   
• Ticket Taker: “Uh, sorry, fellas, but these tickets are counterfeit. Yeah, see, the hologram’s missing, and there’s no such team as the Spungos, and finally, these seem to be printed on some sort of cracker.”
   
• Apparently the postmaster was written as a parody of Burl Ives, which is the kind of inside joke that’s virtually indistinguishable from no joke at all.
   
• Fred Willard (RIP) does some solid work, but he isn’t given any particularly funny or noteworthy lines.
   
• Obscuring characters’ mouths so they could mention the Super Bowl participants despite animating the show several months in advance of the game, is a decent gag on its own. The jokes about whether or not Bill Clinton would still be president are an inspired addition. (By the time the episode aired, Clinton was still several weeks away from being acquitted.)
   
• There’s a joke about Rosey Grier’s portable chapel. Grier is in fact a former NFL player (three-time All Pro, won a championship with the Giants) as well as an ordained minister. He’s a fascinating guy. He was bodyguard to RFK in 1968, and was the one who wrestled the gun away from Sirhan Sirhan moments after the assassination; he wrote a book titled Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint For Men, he has released 29 studio albums, EPs and singles of soul music; appeared in 70 TV shows, including 1972’s feminist classic Free to Be You and Me; starred in The Thing With Two Brains; and had an uncredited cameo in In Cold Blood.
   
• Chief Wiggum pulling a gun on his friends was dark at the time, but now wouldn’t inspire much reaction besides “yeah, cops are awful, we get it.”
   
• The gag about the halftime show with Rob Lowe, Stomp, and Dolly Parton wearing a Snoopy costume was somewhat outdated; since the 1993 performance by Michael Jackson, halftime had begun its transformation into a showcase for big-name performers. In the years leading up to Jackson, the shows were more like a 20-minute variety show, and included New Kids on the Block performing with 2000 local children, Gloria Estefan with help from Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill, and (possibly the show’s nadir) an Elvis impersonater named Elvis Presto.
   
• Getting Rupert Murdoch to call himself a “billionaire tyrant” on TV – is that anything?
   
• No feet in the egg kit. That’s the joke.

Next Week
“Homer to the Max” – now there’s an episode I can say a few things about.