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"Yokel Chords"
The Simpsons episode
Guest stars (from left) Andy Dick, James Patterson, Meg Ryan (as Dr. Swanson), Stephen Sondheim, and Peter Bogdanovich (as a psychologist)
Episode no.	Season 18 Episode 14
Directed by	Susie Dietter
Written by	Michael Price
Production code	JABF09
Original air date	March 4, 2007 (2007-03-04)
Guest appearances
Meg Ryan as Dr. Swanson Andy Dick as himself James Patterson as himself Stephen Sondheim as himself Peter Bogdanovich as psychiatrist
Episode features
Couch gag	The couch is replaced by a vending machine filled with some secondary characters (Apu, Selma, Mr. Burns, Smithers, etc) and the Simpson family. Ralph Wiggum presses C5 and a Homer figurine falls. Ralph retrieves his Homer figurine and bites its head off before leaving.
Commentary	Al Jean Michael Price Matt Selman Tom Gammill and Max Pross David Silverman
Episode chronology
← Previous "Springfield Up" Next → "Rome-Old and Juli-Eh"
The Simpsons season 18
List of episodes

"Yokel Chords" is the fourteenth episode of the eighteenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 4, 2007. It was written by Michael Price, and directed by Susie Dietter. Guest starring Meg Ryan as Dr. Swanson, Peter Bogdanovich as a psychiatrist and Andy Dick, James Patterson and Stephen Sondheim as themselves. This also marked the return of director Susie Dietter who had taken a hiatus to work on Futurama and the film Open Season. This was her first episode in nearly nine years.

It won the 2008 Annie Award for Music in an Animated Television Production.

Plot

Marge oversleeps, and not having made the children's lunch for the day, Homer makes the lunches instead. However, he does not do a very good job - Lisa gets a drawing of a sandwich, Bart gets Grandpa's medication, and even these are mixed up. Bart decides to scare an alternative lunch out of his friends by making up a story about a cannibal cafeteria worker named Dark Stanley, who killed all the students in the cafeteria and put them in his kids' head soup after repeatedly being taunted for not graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was eventually hanged for his crimes. According to Bart, Dark Stanley's ghost haunts the site to repeat his act of murder on the current kids. At lunchtime, Bart pretends to be killed by Dark Stanley, leading all of the students to run screaming into the woods while he takes their lunches. Groundskeeper Willie is sent to fetch sixty-four students back, but he brings seven extra kids (a short-lived total of 71) who are Cletus's children. Their names are Whitney, Jitney, Dubya, Incest, Crystal Meth, International Harvester, and Birthday. Principal Skinner tells Superintendent Chalmers that the kids have been refused education in fear that they will lower test averages and cost the school federal funding (after SES has already lost state, county, and local funding), which Lisa overhears. To appease Lisa, Skinner and Chalmers appoint her tutor of the children.

Lisa's initial tutoring efforts are unsuccessful and so she decides to take the children to downtown Springfield to introduce them to culture in the outside world. However, Lisa's plans are diverted when Krusty spots the kids singing, decides to use them as a musical act for his show, and offers them a contract, which Cletus signs with an "X" (in sharp contrast to his elegant signature in the episode "Sweets and Sour Marge"). Lisa is worried about the way that Krusty and Cletus are exploiting the children with their plans for a national bus "No-Collar Comedy Tour", so she sends an e-mail to Brandine, who is currently a soldier in Iraq. She arrives by helicopter to tell Krusty that the contract Cletus signed is null and void, as he is the father of only two of the seven children — the one who cannot sing and the one who cannot ad-lib. Cletus then tells Brandine that they owe Krusty $12,000, but she assures him that they can live on that, and Cletus is happy to have things back to normal.

Meanwhile, Skinner punishes Bart by having him spend five sessions with a qualified psychiatrist named Dr. Stacey Swanson (Meg Ryan) (Skinner was going to use the school psychiatrist, but after she freaked out about Dark Stanley, Chalmers decided Bart should see someone who was better qualified). Bart is initially unwilling, but Homer insists Bart goes through with it, mainly because there is a Chinese restaurant next door to the psychiatrist where he can get drunk. Initially dismissive, Bart develops a close bond with Swanson, who uses a Mad Libs-like game and violent video games to get Bart to open up about Homer's alcoholism and other matters. When his sessions end, Bart starts to miss the time he spent with her and enters into a state of depression in which he talks about his problems to an empty chair while lying in bed. He also peeks into her window and sees her counseling Milhouse, and hangs his head while biking in the rain when he looks through a window and sees her dancing with the owner of the Chinese restaurant.

A worried Marge uses the funds she had been saving up for Homer's breast reduction surgery to get her son one more session with Swanson. Bart then reveals that Homer and Marge were young and not ready for parenting when he was born, and that he acts out largely so they will focus on him instead of fighting with each other (the theme of which would be revisited in "Postcards from the Wedge"); he also adds he got the name "Dark Stanley" in part because Homer used to hit him with a Stanley-brand hammer. Happy that he got everything off his chest, Bart leaves therapy feeling good, and upon seeing that Swanson is visibly saddened when he leaves, assures her they will see each other again. Swanson goes to see her own psychiatrist (Peter Bogdanovich) where she says she cannot stop thinking about Bart. It is revealed during this discussion that Dark Stanley is in fact real, and had killed her own son: the therapist believes Swanson is projecting onto Bart, though Swanson claims she is not ready to go into that.

Cultural references

• The musical number that plays during Bart's telling of 'Dark Stanley' is Suite Punta del Este, a song from the movie 12 Monkeys composed by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla.
• Lisa takes the Spuckler children to a cultural tour in downtown Springfield. The song that forms the backdrop soundtrack for the tour is "Cultural Things", a parody of "My Favorite Things" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (Cultural Things also echoes "Portobello Road" from another musical, Bedknobs and Broomsticks). There are several more references to The Sound of Music throughout the episode. In a sequence, Lisa takes the kids to an art film screening showing Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. The brief two- second sequence in The Simpsons shows the famous opening scene of the French movie, in which Simone Mareuil's eye is being opened by Buñuel.
• The scene where Dr. Swanson goes to see a therapist is a reference to the TV show The Sopranos, where Dr. Melfi, a therapist herself, is treated by Dr. Elliot Kupferberg. Actor Peter Bogdanovich, who plays Dr. Kupferberg in The Sopranos, is the voice of Dr. Swanson's psychiatrist in this episode.

Reception

Robert Canning of IGN gave the episode a 6.2/10, stating, “This episode of The Simpsons seemed to have a lot going for it. It had many of the ingredients -- lots of guest stars, a storyline loosely based on an existing musical -- that would normally make for a memorable outing, but when it was all over, the whole thing fell short of producing a stellar half-hour. Still, as is often the case with The Simpsons, there were plenty of great laughs, even if the episode as a whole was a bit choppy.”

References

1. Yokel Chords @ IMDb
2. Debruge, Peter (February 8, 2008). "'Ratatouille' nearly sweeps Annies". Variety. Retrieved February 2, 2009.
3. Cletus' Profile @ About.com Archived June 8, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
4. Canning, Robert (March 5, 2007). "The Simpsons: Yokel Chords Review". IGN. Retrieved November 18, 2016.

External links

• "Yokel Chords" at IMDb

• The Simpsons (season 18) episodes
• Musical television episodes
• 2007 American television episodes
• Television episodes about murder