It’s hard to imagine The Simpsons without its nonstop references to popular movies and TV shows, from playful nods to classics like The Wizard of Oz and Raiders of the Lost Ark to more obscure shout-outs to experimental Canadian biopics.
And even after nearly four decades on the air, the show is still mining pop-culture for new ideas; the most recent season of the show featured parodies of ‘80s neo-noir Body Heat and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Not to mention a riff on The White Lotus that inadvertently predicted a scene in the HBO series’ third season.
But some references were just too ridiculous to make it onto the show. Current showrunner Matt Selman recently guested on That Shelf’s Springfield Googolplex podcast, and revealed that, despite the lack of a “monoculture” these days, the show is still very interested in referencing movies and TV shows. “I try to encourage the writers, if you go see a movie or watch a TV show over the weekend, and something pops out as a cultural moment, put it on a card and we’ll put the card on a board,” Selman explained. “And probably it won’t be in the show. But it could be.”
One such board is specifically dedicated to the writers’ more ridiculous ideas. “We have a board full of things just called ‘Sillies,’” Selman noted. “Which I like because it’s a very childlike name.”
Selman proceeded to give an example of one of the show’s unused “sillies,” which involves “a mix-up between an X-Wing and a sex swing.” Yes, one writer noticed that the name of Luke Skywalker’s go-to space fighter sounds a lot like an erotic apparatus, and pitched it to the room.
How would that work in a story? Well, maybe “Comic Book Guy receives a sex swing in the mail, and Moe or (whoever) gets a life-sized X-Wing fighter,” Selman proposed. “I don’t know where it fits. Who knows? Put it on the board, it’s silly.”
Of course, The Simpsons has included a number of Star Wars jokes over the years (some of which even featured Mark Hamill himself). And now that they’re under the same corporate umbrella as Lucasfilm, the world of Springfield has officially crossed over with that galaxy far, far away on multiple occasions — albeit without any references to sexual aides.
The writer also acknowledged that, were he to search online, the joke “probably exists in comedy somewhere (else) also. Because the words are too similar for people not to have already thought about it.”
Unfortunately, it turns out he’s 100 percent right about that…
