While the thirty-seventh season of The Simpsons ended earlier this year, this isn’t stopping Springfield’s finest from returning to the small screen. Starting today, The Simpsons: Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition is airing on Disney+, once again seeing Homer and his brood releasing episodes exclusively on the streaming service. While this latest release will feature wild new takes on Homer Simpson, one of the most unbelievable might not be what you expect. For the Extreme Makeover, The Simpsons has teamed up with real-world locales to create one of the most unbelievable crossovers that we’ve ever experienced as a “couch gag.”
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For those who don’t know, the long-running animated franchise has teamed up with Meow Wolf, an American “arts and entertainment company” known for creating large installations across the country. Located in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas, the art-filled locales create mind-bending stories to house their countless pieces, which The Simpsons has made good use of for its latest opening. First created in 2008, the installation will expand later this year in Los Angeles, California, spreading the weird and wild mission statement to new audiences. Along with the new couch gag, the “Homer Edition” special is re-imagining Homer Simpson in some surprising ways, such as making him a twisted iteration of the Joker. You can check out the new couch gag below.
The Simpsons’ Meow Wolf Experience
To help ring in this wild crossover, Animation Magazine spoke with Meow Wolf co-founder Emily Montoya about the locale entering Springfield, ““Getting the opportunity to be part of the show that has warped our minds since we were kids is a huge honor and an experience we will never forget. Working with Matt Selman and his team was fantastic. From the beginning, they supported and encouraged all our crazy ideas and helped us hone the piece into its final form. We’re especially grateful for their help encapsulating Matt King’s rainbow wizard essence into cameo form.”
The current showrunner of The Simpsons, Matt Selman, revealed that the couch gag came about thanks to his love of the locations, which includes the “Omega Mart” locale in Las Vegas, “I’ve been a huge fan of Meow Wolf ever since I spent hours losing myself in Omega Mart in Las Vegas. After losing myself for many, many, many more hours in the Santa Fe and Denver Meow Wolf installations, I dreamed of trying to steal some of their artist-driven conceptual genius for The Simpsons. This has been a dream collaboration, in that I had to do almost nothing, other than a few Zoom meetings, the brilliant minds at Meow Wolf reimagined the ‘couch gag’ in a way that only they could — delivering the silliness and surreality and homemade outsider sensibility that has blown so many minds. Thank you to all the artists and artisans (not sure of the difference, but maybe there is one) at Meow Wolf for crafting this superbly joyful couch gag!”
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