"The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" is the first episode of The Simpsons' ninth season, and the show's 179th episode overall. It premiered on September 21, 1997 in the United States on Fox. The episode sees the Simpson family traveling to Manhattan to recover the family car, which was taken by Barney Gumble and abandoned outside the World Trade Center complex, thereby gaining numerous parking tickets and a wheel clamp. Upon arrival, the family tours the city, while Homer waits beside his car outside the World Trade Center for a parking officer to remove the clamp. However, that officer turns up while Homer is using the restroom inside one of the towers. In frustration, Homer decides to drive the car with the clamp attached. He eventually succeeds in removing it and races to Central Park to find his family and leave the city.
Writer Ian Maxtone-Graham was interested in making an episode where the Simpson family travels to New York to retrieve their lost car. Executive producers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein suggested that the car be found in Austin J. Tobin Plaza at the World Trade Center, as they wanted a location that would be widely known. Great lengths were taken to make a detailed replica of the borough of Manhattan. The episode received generally positive reviews, and has since been on accolade lists of Simpsons episodes. The "I'm Checkin' In" musical sequence won two awards. Because of the World Trade Center's central role, the episode was initially taken off syndication in many areas following the September 11 attacks, but has come back into syndication in recent years.
Read more about The City Of New York Vs. Homer Simpson: Plot, Production, Cultural References, Reception, Censorship
Famous quotes containing the words city, york, homer and/or simpson:
“Here far from the city we make our roadside stand
And ask for some city money to feel in hand
To try if it will not make our being expand,
And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise
That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’m afraid this man will kill me some day.”
—Nicole Brown Simpson (1957–1994)