King-Size Homer
Encyclopedia
"King-Size Homer" is the seventh episode of The Simpsons
' seventh season
. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 5, 1995. In the episode, Homer
despises the nuclear plant's new exercise program, and decides to gain 61 pounds (28 kg) in order to claim a disability
and work at home. Homer soon begins to experience the negative aspects of being obese, and his life starts falling apart.
The episode was written by Dan Greaney
and directed by Jim Reardon
. Joan Kenley
makes her first out of three guest appearances on The Simpsons in the episode as the voice of the telephone lady. It features cultural references to world's heaviest twins
, the 1993 film What's Eating Gilbert Grape
, and the soft drink Tab
. Since airing, the episode has received positive reviews from fans and television critics, and Empire
named it the best episode of the show. It acquired a Nielsen rating of 10.0, and was the third highest rated show on the Fox network that week.
program at the nuclear power plant, much to everyone's delight but to the dismay of Homer (the only worker who hates doing five minutes of light aerobic exercise). After learning that someone who is disabled
can work from home, and thus be excluded from the exercise program, Homer tries to find a way to achieve this goal. Homer soon discovers that any employee that weighs 300 pounds (136 kg) or more qualifies as disabled, and so he decides to gain the 61 pounds he needs to reach 300. He begins eating excessively, despite Marge
and Lisa
's repeated warnings that he could severely endanger his health. With Bart
's help, Homer soon reaches his goal, and Mr. Burns installs a stay-at-home work terminal in the Simpson house.
Homer is given simple duties but he still neglects his duties as a safety inspector, simply typing 'yes' every time the system prompts him. He also finds he can no longer fit in his clothes, and he takes up wearing a muumuu
as a result. Looking for shortcuts, he leaves his terminal, with a drinking bird
to press the Y key to indicate "yes" on the keyboard and goes out to see a film. Refused admittance because of his size, Homer is angered after the cinema manager and other members of the public make jokes about his appearances. He quickly leaves, claiming that he is not food crazy and that overweight people are as hardworking as anyone else. Returning home, he finds that, in his absence, the nodding drinking bird fell over and that a nuclear meltdown
is about to take place at the plant unless the system is manually shut down. As he is unable to stop it via the computer and unable to phone the plant and warn them because his fingers have grown too fat to properly dial, Homer tries to run, skateboard, and drive to the plant, all of which fail as a result of his obesity. He eventually gets to the plant by stealing an ice cream truck. Homer arrives at the power plant and climbs up to reach the manual shutdown button, but ends up accidentally falling onto the gas store, blocking the release tube with his oversized buttocks and thus preventing the explosion. As a reward for turning the "potential Chernobyl
" into a "mere Three Mile Island
," Mr. Burns gives Homer a medal and guarantees that he will make Homer thin once more after he gets decontaminated from the tank. But when Homer can't even do one sit-up in their first work-out session, Mr. Burns frustratedly decides that he'll just pay for liposuction
instead, much to Homer's delight.
"King-Size Homer" was written by Dan Greaney
, and directed by Jim Reardon
. It was the first episode Greaney wrote for The Simpsons. Prior to this episode he was working as a lawyer and was contemplating moving to Kiev
, Ukraine
, to work for a start-up company. He said that this episode "saved" him from doing so. Greaney pitched some ideas to the writing staff, but none of them were any good, so then-show runner Bill Oakley
gave him the idea for this episode. Oakley had Greaney come to Hollywood to write it, and when Greaney showed the first draft to the staff, they liked it, so Oakley hired him.
The writers wanted the title of the episode to make Homer sound proud about his weight, so they decided to name it "King-Size Homer". Greaney really enjoyed working on the episode because Homer is constantly happy and goal oriented in it, instead of being a slob and "eating all the time". The Simpsons animator David Silverman
designed the fat Homer for the episode. There was a discussion about what Homer would wear when he became fat, and they decided to go with a muumuu dress. The writers were also discussing about how they were going to treat Homer's fatness. They did not want Homer to come off as a "hog", so they decided that the viewer should barely see him eating after he reaches his 300 pounds goal. As the writers were trying to figure out a way to get Homer back to his old weight by the end of the episode, someone suggested that Homer should feel bad about his obesity, and therefore become thin for Marge, but that idea was scrapped in early production. Action figurines based on fat Homer were made for the World of Springfield
series shortly after the episode had aired.
Homer has a dream in which he is standing at the foot of a mountain with 300 pounds as the goal at the top. A pig wearing a tuxedo appears next to him in the dream, and motivates Homer to reach the top of the mountain. Homer takes a bite of the pig's arm, and runs up the mountain. This scene was inspired by the cover of the "Sweetness and Light" issue of the National Lampoon magazine. The staff thought that Cary Grant
would have been the ideal for the pig in Homer's dream sequence, but he died nine years before the episode was made, so they used cast member Hank Azaria
for that voice. Joan Kenley
guest starred in the episode as the telephone lady who tells Homer: "The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now." The staff flew her down from Northern California
to record her part for the episode.
s wearing identical outfits and riding on bikes are shown. These are based on Billy and Benny McCrary
, the world's heaviest twins who weighed over 700 pounds (318 kg) each. They received fame after appearing in the The Guinness Book of World Records in a picture that depicts the twins riding their Honda motorcycles. They would appear again in the same season in the episode "The Day the Violence Died
". The scene in which Bart and his friends observe the obese Homer through a window is based on a scene from the 1993 film What's Eating Gilbert Grape
.
Homer thinks that he can order the soft drink Tab
by pressing the tab key
on the keyboard. When Homer vents gas from a nuclear reactor, the gas destroys crops of corn. A farmer looks and says, "Oh no, the corn! Paul Newman
's gonna have ma' legs broke!" This is in reference to the legend of Newman's Own
popcorn products, in which Newman threatens anyone who might try to steal his popcorn. At the cinema, Homer tries to watch the film Honk If You're Horny, starring actor Pauly Shore
and actress Faye Dunaway
.
, and Beverly Hills, 90210
.
Since airing, the episode has received mostly positive reviews from fans and television critics. In 2008, Empire
placed The Simpsons at the top of their list of "The 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time", and noted "King-Size Homer" as the show's best episode, calling it "An unimprovable mix of sharp dialogue, hilarious sight gags and heart." Kimberly Potts of AOL Television named the episode the seventh best episode of the show, while Michael Moran of The Times
ranked it as the tenth best. "King-Size Homer" appeared on The Star-Ledger
' s list of the ten best episodes on The Simpsons that represent the comic and emotional scope of the show. The Herald Sun
put the episode at ninth place on their list of the top twenty episodes of The Simpsons, and highlighted the scene in which Homer is seen "commandeering an ice cream truck in a frantic dash to the nuclear plant to avoid an impending meltdown". Todd VanDerWerff of Slant Magazine
named the episode the show's fifth best, stating "while there are a lot of funny jokes in this episode (including Homer's fingers that are too fat to dial), the best thing about it is the sight of Homer, weighing well over 300 pounds, dressed in a muumuu and a 'fat guy hat.' The climax is a little forced and cartoon-y...but Homer's weight gain works so well visually that the episode gets away with a lot more than it might.
Dave Foster of DVD Times said: "The glee to which [Homer] takes to the challenge and the enthusiasm which Bart brings to the project show these two really do connect when the situation is oh so wrong, and the method in which the writers tackle the not-always-so-obvious downsides to such a disability are both adult and astutely amusing." Jennifer Malkowski of DVD Verdict considered the best part of the episode to be during Homer's shopping trip to The Vast Waistband. The website concluded its review by giving the episode a grade of A. DVD Movie Guide's Colin Jacobson enjoyed the episode and called it "one of the series' more cynical episodes", and said that it "pours on the laughs". He continued by saying, "It's amusing to see Homer's pursuit of obesity, and it exploits his idiocy well. It lacks the expected mushiness about the plight of fat folks, though it does make a point about sensitivity in an understated way." Despite the numerous laughs at Homer's appearance from the staff of The Simpsons on the DVD audio commentary
for the episode, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, wrote: "this isn't one of the best episodes. Homer's at his most irritating and childish here - you really want Marge to beat him up." They added that Homer's antics with the computer, such as the scene in which he tries to find the any key
, and Mr. Burns running exercise classes are the highlights of the episode.
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
The Simpsons (season 7)
The Simpsons seventh season originally aired on the Fox network between September 17, 1995 and May 19, 1996. The show runners for the seventh production season were Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein who would executive produce 21 episodes this season. David Mirkin executive produced the remaining...
. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 5, 1995. In the episode, Homer
Homer Simpson
Homer Jay Simpson is a fictional character in the animated television series The Simpsons and the patriarch of the eponymous family. He is voiced by Dan Castellaneta and first appeared on television, along with the rest of his family, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...
despises the nuclear plant's new exercise program, and decides to gain 61 pounds (28 kg) in order to claim a disability
Disability
A disability may be physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these.Many people would rather be referred to as a person with a disability instead of handicapped...
and work at home. Homer soon begins to experience the negative aspects of being obese, and his life starts falling apart.
The episode was written by Dan Greaney
Dan Greaney
Daniel "Dan" Greaney is an American television writer. He has written for The Simpsons. He was hired during the show's seventh season after writing the first draft of the episode "King-Size Homer", but left after season eleven...
and directed by Jim Reardon
Jim Reardon
Jim Reardon is an animation director and storyboard consultant, best known for his work on the animated TV series The Simpsons. He has directed over 30 episodes of the series, and was credited as a supervising director for seasons 9 through 15...
. Joan Kenley
Joan Kenley
Joan Kenley, PhD is a radio talk show host, psychologist, media personality, consultant, best selling author, and celebrity voice. Known for her speaking voice, Dr. Kenley can be heard on major voicemail systems as well as the “telephone lady” on the hit TV show The Simpsons...
makes her first out of three guest appearances on The Simpsons in the episode as the voice of the telephone lady. It features cultural references to world's heaviest twins
McGuire twins
Billy Leon McCrary and Benny Loyd McCrary , known together as the McGuire twins, were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "World's Heaviest Twins"...
, the 1993 film What's Eating Gilbert Grape
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a 1993 film directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. Peter Hedges wrote the screenplay adapted from his 1991 novel of the same name...
, and the soft drink Tab
Tab (soft drink)
Tab, stylized as TaB, is a diet cola soft drink produced by the Coca-Cola Company, first introduced in 1963. The soda was created by Coca Cola after the successful sales and marketing of Diet Rite cola, owned by The Royal Crown Company; previously, Diet Rite had been the only sugarless soda on the...
. Since airing, the episode has received positive reviews from fans and television critics, and Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
named it the best episode of the show. It acquired a Nielsen rating of 10.0, and was the third highest rated show on the Fox network that week.
Plot
Mr. Burns organizes a morning calisthenicsCalisthenics
Calisthenics are a form of aerobic exercise consisting of a variety of simple, often rhythmical, movements, generally using multiple equipment or apparatus. They are intended to increase body strength and flexibility with movements such as bending, jumping, swinging, twisting or kicking, using...
program at the nuclear power plant, much to everyone's delight but to the dismay of Homer (the only worker who hates doing five minutes of light aerobic exercise). After learning that someone who is disabled
Disability
A disability may be physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these.Many people would rather be referred to as a person with a disability instead of handicapped...
can work from home, and thus be excluded from the exercise program, Homer tries to find a way to achieve this goal. Homer soon discovers that any employee that weighs 300 pounds (136 kg) or more qualifies as disabled, and so he decides to gain the 61 pounds he needs to reach 300. He begins eating excessively, despite Marge
Marge Simpson
Marjorie "Marge" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the eponymous family. She is voiced by actress Julie Kavner and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...
and Lisa
Lisa Simpson
Lisa Marie Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons. She is the middle child of the Simpson family. Voiced by Yeardley Smith, Lisa first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. Cartoonist Matt Groening...
's repeated warnings that he could severely endanger his health. With Bart
Bart Simpson
Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...
's help, Homer soon reaches his goal, and Mr. Burns installs a stay-at-home work terminal in the Simpson house.
Homer is given simple duties but he still neglects his duties as a safety inspector, simply typing 'yes' every time the system prompts him. He also finds he can no longer fit in his clothes, and he takes up wearing a muumuu
Muumuu
The muumuu or muumuu is a loose dress of Hawaiian origin that hangs from the shoulder. Like the Aloha shirt, muumuu exports are often brilliantly colored with floral patterns of generic Polynesian motifs. Muumuu for local Hawaiian residents are more subdued in tone...
as a result. Looking for shortcuts, he leaves his terminal, with a drinking bird
Drinking bird
Drinking birds, also known as dippy birds and dipping birds, are toy heat engines that mimic the motions of a bird drinking from a fountain or other water source. They are sometimes incorrectly considered examples of a perpetual motion device....
to press the Y key to indicate "yes" on the keyboard and goes out to see a film. Refused admittance because of his size, Homer is angered after the cinema manager and other members of the public make jokes about his appearances. He quickly leaves, claiming that he is not food crazy and that overweight people are as hardworking as anyone else. Returning home, he finds that, in his absence, the nodding drinking bird fell over and that a nuclear meltdown
Nuclear meltdown
Nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
is about to take place at the plant unless the system is manually shut down. As he is unable to stop it via the computer and unable to phone the plant and warn them because his fingers have grown too fat to properly dial, Homer tries to run, skateboard, and drive to the plant, all of which fail as a result of his obesity. He eventually gets to the plant by stealing an ice cream truck. Homer arrives at the power plant and climbs up to reach the manual shutdown button, but ends up accidentally falling onto the gas store, blocking the release tube with his oversized buttocks and thus preventing the explosion. As a reward for turning the "potential Chernobyl
Chernobyl disaster
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine , which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities in Moscow...
" into a "mere Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station
Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is a civilian nuclear power plant located on Three Mile Island in the Susquehanna River, south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It has two separate units, known as TMI-1 and TMI-2...
," Mr. Burns gives Homer a medal and guarantees that he will make Homer thin once more after he gets decontaminated from the tank. But when Homer can't even do one sit-up in their first work-out session, Mr. Burns frustratedly decides that he'll just pay for liposuction
Liposuction
Liposuction, also known as lipoplasty , liposculpture suction lipectomy or simply lipo is a cosmetic surgery operation that removes fat from many different sites on the human body...
instead, much to Homer's delight.
Production
Dan Greaney
Daniel "Dan" Greaney is an American television writer. He has written for The Simpsons. He was hired during the show's seventh season after writing the first draft of the episode "King-Size Homer", but left after season eleven...
, and directed by Jim Reardon
Jim Reardon
Jim Reardon is an animation director and storyboard consultant, best known for his work on the animated TV series The Simpsons. He has directed over 30 episodes of the series, and was credited as a supervising director for seasons 9 through 15...
. It was the first episode Greaney wrote for The Simpsons. Prior to this episode he was working as a lawyer and was contemplating moving to Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, to work for a start-up company. He said that this episode "saved" him from doing so. Greaney pitched some ideas to the writing staff, but none of them were any good, so then-show runner Bill Oakley
Bill Oakley
Bill Oakley is an American television writer and producer, known for his work on the animated comedy series The Simpsons. Oakley and Josh Weinstein became best friends and writing partners at high school; Oakley then attended Harvard University and was Vice President of the Harvard Lampoon...
gave him the idea for this episode. Oakley had Greaney come to Hollywood to write it, and when Greaney showed the first draft to the staff, they liked it, so Oakley hired him.
The writers wanted the title of the episode to make Homer sound proud about his weight, so they decided to name it "King-Size Homer". Greaney really enjoyed working on the episode because Homer is constantly happy and goal oriented in it, instead of being a slob and "eating all the time". The Simpsons animator David Silverman
David Silverman
David Silverman is an animator best known for directing numerous episodes of the animated TV series The Simpsons, as well as The Simpsons Movie...
designed the fat Homer for the episode. There was a discussion about what Homer would wear when he became fat, and they decided to go with a muumuu dress. The writers were also discussing about how they were going to treat Homer's fatness. They did not want Homer to come off as a "hog", so they decided that the viewer should barely see him eating after he reaches his 300 pounds goal. As the writers were trying to figure out a way to get Homer back to his old weight by the end of the episode, someone suggested that Homer should feel bad about his obesity, and therefore become thin for Marge, but that idea was scrapped in early production. Action figurines based on fat Homer were made for the World of Springfield
World of Springfield
The World of Springfield is a series of action figures featuring characters from the animated sitcom The Simpsons. The line ran between December 1999 and December 2004 and was released by Playmates Toys....
series shortly after the episode had aired.
Homer has a dream in which he is standing at the foot of a mountain with 300 pounds as the goal at the top. A pig wearing a tuxedo appears next to him in the dream, and motivates Homer to reach the top of the mountain. Homer takes a bite of the pig's arm, and runs up the mountain. This scene was inspired by the cover of the "Sweetness and Light" issue of the National Lampoon magazine. The staff thought that Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...
would have been the ideal for the pig in Homer's dream sequence, but he died nine years before the episode was made, so they used cast member Hank Azaria
Hank Azaria
Henry Albert "Hank" Azaria is an American film, television and stage actor, director, voice actor, and comedian. He is noted for being one of the principal voice actors on the animated television series The Simpsons , on which he performs the voices of Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief...
for that voice. Joan Kenley
Joan Kenley
Joan Kenley, PhD is a radio talk show host, psychologist, media personality, consultant, best selling author, and celebrity voice. Known for her speaking voice, Dr. Kenley can be heard on major voicemail systems as well as the “telephone lady” on the hit TV show The Simpsons...
guest starred in the episode as the telephone lady who tells Homer: "The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now." The staff flew her down from Northern California
Northern California
Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
to record her part for the episode.
Cultural references
While Homer is in the clothes store, as the camera pans with him, two mannequinMannequin
A mannequin is an often articulated doll used by artists, tailors, dressmakers, and others especially to display or fit clothing...
s wearing identical outfits and riding on bikes are shown. These are based on Billy and Benny McCrary
McGuire twins
Billy Leon McCrary and Benny Loyd McCrary , known together as the McGuire twins, were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "World's Heaviest Twins"...
, the world's heaviest twins who weighed over 700 pounds (318 kg) each. They received fame after appearing in the The Guinness Book of World Records in a picture that depicts the twins riding their Honda motorcycles. They would appear again in the same season in the episode "The Day the Violence Died
The Day the Violence Died
"The Day the Violence Died" is the eighteenth episode of The Simpsons seventh season and originally aired on March 17, 1996. It was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Wesley Archer. Kirk Douglas guest stars as Chester J...
". The scene in which Bart and his friends observe the obese Homer through a window is based on a scene from the 1993 film What's Eating Gilbert Grape
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a 1993 film directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. Peter Hedges wrote the screenplay adapted from his 1991 novel of the same name...
.
Homer thinks that he can order the soft drink Tab
Tab (soft drink)
Tab, stylized as TaB, is a diet cola soft drink produced by the Coca-Cola Company, first introduced in 1963. The soda was created by Coca Cola after the successful sales and marketing of Diet Rite cola, owned by The Royal Crown Company; previously, Diet Rite had been the only sugarless soda on the...
by pressing the tab key
Tab key
Tab key on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop.- Origin :The word tab derives from the word tabulate, which means "to arrange data in a tabular, or table, form"...
on the keyboard. When Homer vents gas from a nuclear reactor, the gas destroys crops of corn. A farmer looks and says, "Oh no, the corn! Paul Newman
Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver and auto racing enthusiast...
's gonna have ma' legs broke!" This is in reference to the legend of Newman's Own
Newman's Own
Newman's Own is a food company and for-profit corporation founded by actor Paul Newman and author A. E. Hotchner in 1982. Newman received all of the profits from product sales and donated 100% of the proceeds, after taxes, to various educational and charitable organizations of his own selection...
popcorn products, in which Newman threatens anyone who might try to steal his popcorn. At the cinema, Homer tries to watch the film Honk If You're Horny, starring actor Pauly Shore
Pauly Shore
Paul Montgomery "Pauly" Shore is an American comedian and actor who starred in several comedy films in the 1990s and hosted a video show on MTV in the late 1980s and early 1990s...
and actress Faye Dunaway
Faye Dunaway
Faye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...
.
Reception
In its original American broadcast, "King-Size Homer" finished 45th (tied with Melrose Place) in the ratings for the week of October 30 to November 3, 1995, with a Nielsen rating of 10.0. The episode was the third highest rated show on the Fox network that week (tied with Melrose Place again), following The X-FilesThe X-Files
The X-Files is an American science fiction television series and a part of The X-Files franchise, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. The program originally aired from to . The show was a hit for the Fox network, and its characters and slogans became popular culture touchstones in the 1990s...
, and Beverly Hills, 90210
Beverly Hills, 90210
Beverly Hills, 90210 is an American drama series that originally aired from October 4, 1990 to May 17, 2000 on Fox and was produced by Spelling Television in the United States, and subsequently on various networks around the world. It is the first series in the Beverly Hills, 90210 franchise...
.
Since airing, the episode has received mostly positive reviews from fans and television critics. In 2008, Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
placed The Simpsons at the top of their list of "The 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time", and noted "King-Size Homer" as the show's best episode, calling it "An unimprovable mix of sharp dialogue, hilarious sight gags and heart." Kimberly Potts of AOL Television named the episode the seventh best episode of the show, while Michael Moran of The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
ranked it as the tenth best. "King-Size Homer" appeared on The Star-Ledger
The Star-Ledger
The Star-Ledger is the largest circulated newspaper in the U.S. state of New Jersey and is based in Newark. It is a sister paper to The Jersey Journal of Jersey City, The Times of Trenton and the Staten Island Advance, all of which are owned by Advance Publications.The Newark Star-Ledgers daily...
Herald Sun
The Herald Sun is a morning tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia. It is published by The Herald and Weekly Times, a subsidiary of News Limited, itself a subsidiary of News Corporation. It is available for purchase throughout Melbourne, Regional Victoria, Tasmania, the Australian Capital...
put the episode at ninth place on their list of the top twenty episodes of The Simpsons, and highlighted the scene in which Homer is seen "commandeering an ice cream truck in a frantic dash to the nuclear plant to avoid an impending meltdown". Todd VanDerWerff of Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
named the episode the show's fifth best, stating "while there are a lot of funny jokes in this episode (including Homer's fingers that are too fat to dial), the best thing about it is the sight of Homer, weighing well over 300 pounds, dressed in a muumuu and a 'fat guy hat.' The climax is a little forced and cartoon-y...but Homer's weight gain works so well visually that the episode gets away with a lot more than it might.
Dave Foster of DVD Times said: "The glee to which [Homer] takes to the challenge and the enthusiasm which Bart brings to the project show these two really do connect when the situation is oh so wrong, and the method in which the writers tackle the not-always-so-obvious downsides to such a disability are both adult and astutely amusing." Jennifer Malkowski of DVD Verdict considered the best part of the episode to be during Homer's shopping trip to The Vast Waistband. The website concluded its review by giving the episode a grade of A. DVD Movie Guide's Colin Jacobson enjoyed the episode and called it "one of the series' more cynical episodes", and said that it "pours on the laughs". He continued by saying, "It's amusing to see Homer's pursuit of obesity, and it exploits his idiocy well. It lacks the expected mushiness about the plight of fat folks, though it does make a point about sensitivity in an understated way." Despite the numerous laughs at Homer's appearance from the staff of The Simpsons on the DVD audio commentary
Audio commentary
On disc-based video formats, an audio commentary is an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with video...
for the episode, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, wrote: "this isn't one of the best episodes. Homer's at his most irritating and childish here - you really want Marge to beat him up." They added that Homer's antics with the computer, such as the scene in which he tries to find the any key
Any key
Computer programmers historically used "Press any key to continue" as a prompt to the user when it was necessary to pause processing. The system would resume after the user pressed any keyboard button.-History:...
, and Mr. Burns running exercise classes are the highlights of the episode.
External links
- "King-Size Homer" at The Simpsons.com