22 Short Films About Springfield

Plot

The episode is a series of shorts ranging in length from under half a minute to over two and a half minutes, each showing daily life in Springfield, after Bart wonders if anything interesting happens to the town's citizens.

1. Bart and Milhouse spit and squirt condiments from a highway overpass onto cars, then go to the Kwik-E-Mart.
2. Apu closes the Kwik-E-Mart for five minutes to attend a party at Sanjay's house, trapping Moleman in the store.
3. Bart unknowingly throws gum in Lisa's hair, and Marge tries to remove the gum by putting peanut butter and mayonnaise on her hair. Lisa's hair attracts a swarm of bees, one of which flies away.
4. While bike riding with Mr. Burns, Smithers suffers an allergic reaction to the bee's sting and rides to the hospital, but the orderlies admit only Burns.
5. Dr. Nick is criticized by the hospital board for his unorthodox medical procedures, only to treat Grampa with an electric light socket, saving his career.
6. Moe gets robbed by Snake after Barney gives Moe $2,000 to pay for a portion of his $14 billion bar tab.
7. While hosting Superintendent Chalmers for lunch, Principal Skinner burns his roast and bluffs his way through the meal, replacing the roast with hamburgers from Krusty Burger and dubbing them "steamed hams", explaining that it is what people in Albany call them, setting his house on fire in the process.
8. Homer accidentally traps Maggie in a newspaper vending box.
9. Chief Wiggum, Lou, and Eddie compare McDonald's and Krusty Burger.
10. Bumblebee Man arrives home after a horrible day at work and his house is destroyed, causing his wife to leave him.
11. Snake runs Wiggum over, and their ensuing fight ends with Herman capturing them at gunpoint in his store.
12. Reverend Lovejoy urges his Old English Sheepdog to relieve himself on Ned Flanders's lawn.
13. Various townspeople advise Marge and Lisa how to remove the gum stuck in Lisa's hair.
14. Cletus offers Brandine some shoes he found on a telephone line.
15. Milhouse tries to use the bathroom in Comic Book Guy's Android's Dungeon, but can only use it if he buys something, and his father forces him to leave the store before he can use it. They go to use the bathroom in Herman's store and Milhouse accidentally knocks out Herman with a flail, saving his father, Snake, and Wiggum.
16. Jake the barber cuts the gum out of Lisa's hair, leaving her with a different hairstyle.
17. Nelson laughs at Lisa's new haircut and at Ian, an extremely tall man in a Volkswagen Beetle, the latter of whom publicly humiliates Nelson to teach him a lesson.
18. Bart and Milhouse squirt ketchup and mustard onto Nelson from the overpass, and conclude that life is interesting in their town after all.
19. Professor Frink attempts to tell his story but is cut off by the ending credits.

Production

The episode's principal idea came from the season four episode "The Front", which contained a short sequence entitled The Adventures of Ned Flanders, featuring its own title card and theme song, at its conclusion. The scene has no relevance to the main plot of the episode and was designed solely as filler to accommodate the episode's short runtime. The staff loved the concept and attempted to fit similar scenes into other episodes, but none were short enough to require one. Show runners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein decided to make an entire episode of linked short scenes involving many of the show's characters, similar to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Originally there were more scenes, but several of them had to be cut out for time. Brent Forrester wrote the Krusty Burger scene,

The first draft was 65 pages long and needed to be cut down to just 42, so numerous scenes were removed for time or because they did not fit into the overall dynamic of the episode. Those that were hard to link were put before or after an act break or were given a theme song, one of which was cut from the Apu story, but was included as a deleted scene on The Complete Seventh Season DVD.

Oakley wrote the Chalmers scene because he is his all-time favorite character from the show. The main reason he loved him was that, until Frank Grimes was created for the season eight episode "Homer's Enemy", Chalmers was the only character that "seemed to operate in the normal human universe".

In the Mr. Burns story, every word he yells at Smithers is real and used correctly. To maintain accuracy, the writers used a 19th-century slang thesaurus. Ian, the very tall man, was a caricature of writer Ian Maxtone-Graham also sharing his first name, and the crowd on the street who laugh at Nelson, Oakley wrote in the script that the street was filled with Springfield's biggest idiots; the animators drew caricatures of him, Weinstein, and Groening into the scene.

Cultural references

The episode's title is a reference to François Girard's film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. The episode contains numerous references to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Like the film, the episode is episodic, though the stories are interconnected. The policemen's conversation about McDonald's parallels the famous "Royale With Cheese" discussion, The writers were pleased that Herman already existed, as otherwise they would have had to create another character just for this scene. The Dr. Nick segment is a parody of ER. After passing the board, Dr. Nick exclaims "Free nose jobs for everybody!"; Jasper Beardsley says "Give me a Van Heflin."

Reception

In its original broadcast, "22 Short Films About Springfield" finished tied for 73rd in the weekly ratings for the week of April 8–14, 1996, with a Nielsen rating of 6.9. It was the seventh highest rated show from the Fox network that week. It is Bill Oakley's personal favorite episode, but he claimed that it is hated by two prominent (and unnamed) figures within the running of the show. The episode is frequently cited as a popular one among the show's fans on the Internet.

In 1998, TV Guide listed it in its list of top twelve Simpsons episodes.

Entertainment Weekly, in 2003, placed the episode 14th on their top 25 The Simpsons episode list, praising the episode's structure and finding the Pulp Fiction references "priceless". The episode is the favorite of British comedian Jimmy Carr who, in 2003, called it "a brilliant pastiche of art cinema".

In 2004, Empire named the episode's Pulp Fiction parody the seventh best film gag in the show, calling Wiggum and Snake bound and gagged with red balls in their mouths "the sickest visual gag in Simpsons history".

Gary Russell and Gareth Roberts, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, called it "an untypical episode, and a very good one", naming the Skinner and Chalmers story as the best.

In 2019, several sources cited the episode as one of the show's best, including Consequence of Sound who ranked it number five on its list of top 30 Simpsons episodes; Entertainment.ie who named it among the 10 greatest Simpsons episodes of all time; The Guardian who named it one of the five greatest episodes in Simpsons history; and, in early 2010, IGN named "A Fish Called Selma" the best episode of the seventh season, adding that "22 Short Films About Springfield" was "good competition" for the crown. When The Simpsons began streaming on Disney+ in 2019, Oakley named this one of the best classic Simpsons episodes to watch on the service.

Emily St. James praised the episode: "'22 Short Films' is fundamentally an experiment, an attempt by the series to do something different at a time when coming up with stories must have started to get exhausting. But it's also a wonderful reminder of how everybody on this show was the protagonist of some other, weirder show. The Simpsons might have been the center of the series, but they didn't need to be the only thing in it anymore. Springfield had ceased to be a solar system with them as the sun. Instead, everybody else had become stars of their own, and the show expanded into a galaxy."

Legacy

Unproduced spin-off

The episode sparked the idea among the staff for a spin-off series entitled Springfield Stories or simply Springfield. By 2006, the staff maintained that it was something that they would still be interested in doing, and by 2007 that it "could happen someday". "22 Short Films About Springfield" also helped inspire the Futurama episode "Three Hundred Big Boys".

"Steamed Hams"

In one segment of the episode, titled "Skinner & The Superintendent", a frenzied Seymour Skinner attempts to pass off fast food hamburgers as home-cooked "steamed hams", claiming that it is an expression in the regional dialect of Albany, New York, and later attempts to explain away a growing kitchen fire as an improbable case of aurora borealis. Starting in 2016, over two decades from the episode's premiere, the scene gained renewed popularity in Facebook groups and pages relating to The Simpsons. It has also spawned numerous parody and remix videos on YouTube, many of them featuring "Steamed Hams But..." in their titles.

In 2018, Bill Oakley, the writer of the segment, posted the original draft for the segment on Twitter. He said he believed it was the most famous thing he had written, and that it was also one of his favorites. Oakley responded immediately on Twitter, writing, "[I'm] not a fan of fairly big companies like GameSpot having famous actors perform scripts I wrote, verbatim, without giving me any sort of credit whatsoever." The video was taken down within days.

In a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Oakley, Weinstein, animation director Jim Reardon, voice actor Hank Azaria and Simpsons showrunner Al Jean shared their thoughts about the popularity of "Steamed Hams". Azaria said he was confused about how popular the segment had become. Reardon became aware of it when his daughters pointed it out a few years prior. They shared their favorite "Steamed Hams" parodies, including one made with Lego animation, one animating the characters in the style of the music video for the song "Take On Me" by A-ha, and one with the dialogue synchronized to the vocals of "Basket Case" by Green Day. Weinstein said that Groening also enjoyed the phenomenon. A series of short film pastiches in 2025 recreate the scene in the style of the Soviet film The Glass Harmonica and the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Availability

On March 12, 2002, the episode was released in the United States on a DVD collection titled The Simpsons Film Festival, along with the season eleven episode "Beyond Blunderdome", the season four episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", and the season six episode "A Star Is Burns".

The DVD boxset for season seven was released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in the United States and Canada on December 13, 2005, nine years after it had completed broadcast on television. The episode 22 Short Films About Springfield features an optional audio commentary track featuring Richard Appel, David X. Cohen, Matt Groening, Bill Oakley, Rachel Pulido, Jim Reardon, David Silverman, Yeardley Smith and Josh Weinstein.

References

References

1. (2000). "22 Short Films About Springfield". BBC.
2. Groening, Matt. (1997). "The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family". [[HarperPerennial]].
3. Oakley, Bill. (2006). "The Simpsons The Complete Seventh Season DVD commentary for the episode "22 Short Films About Springfield"". 20th Century Fox.
4. VanHooker, Brian. (August 18, 2020). "An Oral History of 'Steamed Hams', the Funniest 'Simpsons' Scene Ever Recorded".
5. Weinstein, Josh. (2006). "The Simpsons The Complete Seventh Season DVD commentary for the episode "22 Short Films About Springfield"". 20th Century Fox.
6. Appel, Richard. (2006). "The Simpsons The Complete Seventh Season DVD commentary for the episode "22 Short Films About Springfield"". 20th Century Fox.
7. Murray, Noel. (2010-03-25). "The Simpsons, "22 Short Films About Springfield"". [[The A.V. Club]].
8. (1993-05-05). "Nielsen ratings/April 26-May 2". [[Long Beach Press-Telegram]].
9. (January 3–9, 1998). "A Dozen Doozies". [[TV Guide]].
10. (2003-01-29). "The best ''Simpsons'' episodes, Nos. 11-15".
11. (2003-04-14). "Why there's no place like Homer's". [[The Times]].
12. Kennedy, Colin. (September 2004). "The Ten Best Movie Gags In ''The Simpsons''".
13. Preddle, Jon. (June 1997). "Gary Russell: From Peladon to Placebos". The New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
14. (2019-12-17). "The Simpsons' Top 30 Episodes". [[Consequence of Sound]].
15. Molumby, Deidre. (September 6, 2019). "The 10 greatest 'The Simpsons' episodes of all time". [[Entertainment.ie]].
16. Belam, Martin. (November 28, 2019). "The Simpsons: the five greatest episodes in the iconic show's history". [[The Guardian]].
17. (2010-01-08). "The Simpsons: 20 Seasons, 20 Episodes".
18. Katz, Mathew. (2019-11-11). "The best classic Simpsons episodes on Disney+". [[Digital Trends]].
19. James, Emily. (June 22, 2014). "The Simpsons (Classic): "22 Short Films About Springfield"".
20. (2006). "The Simpsons The Complete Seventh Season DVD commentary for the episode "22 Short Films About Springfield"". 20th Century Fox.
21. Jeffery, Morgan. (2014-12-12). "The Simpsons spinoff was once planned, reveals ex-showrunner".
22. Richards, Olly. (2007-05-24). "Life In Development Hell".
23. (28 August 2018). "'Simpsons' Unkillable 'Steamed Hams' Meme Explained".
24. (17 January 2018). "How a 20-year-old 'Simpsons' joke about steamed hams became a huge meme".
25. Frank, Allegra. (2018-01-04). "The internet revives The Simpsons' greatest joke, 'Steamed Hams': Let us now praise 'Steamed Hams'".
26. Oakley, Bill. (2018-01-04). "Steamed Hams, but it's the original first draft in a thread".
27. (April 2, 2018). "A 'Steamed Hams' Meme With Jeff Goldblum Is Gone Thanks To A Simpsons Writer". [[Pedestrian.TV]].
28. https://www.ctvnews.ca/winnipeg/article/steamed-hams-but-its-elevated-to-an-art-form-winnipegger-scoring-big-with-youtube-videos-inspired-by-simpsons-meme/
29. Madden, Damian. (2002-03-31). "Simpsons: Film Festival". DVD Bits.
30. "The Simpsons — The Complete 7th Season (Marge Head)". [[TVShowsOnDVD.com]].