Thirty Minutes over Tokyo

Plot

While visiting an Internet café with Bart and Lisa, Homer is cyber-robbed by Snake of his bank's entire savings account, which the family planned to use for a vacation. When Ned Flanders catches Homer burgling his house, he says he got more for less by attending the Chuck Garabedian Mega-Savings Seminar. Homer steals Ned's tickets and the Simpsons attend the seminar, in which Chuck explains many money-saving strategies. The Simpsons follow them and save enough for a Garabedian-sponsored vacation. They steal airplane tickets from the Flanders at the airport and go to Tokyo, Japan.

Homer and Bart separate from Marge and Lisa and attend a sumo match. When a wrestler steals Homer's pretzel, he and Bart knock him out, then when the Emperor of Japan, Akihito, congratulates Homer, he throws him into a dumpster of worn mawashi. As a result, he and Bart are put in jail until Marge pays the bail. Consequently, the only money the family has left is a one-million yen bill, which Lisa loses in the wind after Homer created an origami crane from it.

The family finds work in a fish-gutting factory in Osaka, where they notice a TV game show called The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show. They go on it, telling the host Wink that they wish for plane tickets to Springfield. In order to get them, they go through physical torture (particularly Homer), then must pick them up from a rickety bridge over an active volcano. Lisa is able to get the tickets, but Wink breaks the bridge and the whole family falls into the volcano, which is actually orangeade with lots of wasabi added. As the Simpsons leave Japan, their plane is briefly confronted by four giant monsters – Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera and Rodan before it flies off on the journey to Springfield.

Production

The episode, which was originally titled "Fat Man and Little Boy" (which went on to be used for the name of a Season 16 episode), was directed by Jim Reardon and written by Donick Cary and Dan Greaney. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on May 16, 1999. "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" was one of the last episodes produced for the series' tenth season. Staff writers Cary and Greaney wrote the draft in a couple of days, and it was then rewritten "extensively" with The Simpsons' writing staff. Originally, there would be a long scene about how Homer had bought a "pre-Columbian vase" on the Internet, however the scene was ultimately cut from the episode. The episode's title is a reference to the 1944 war film 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Originally, the staff wanted the title to be "Twenty-two Minutes Over Tokyo", since an episode of The Simpsons is approximately twenty-two minutes long, but they eventually changed it to its current rendition because it “sounds closer to” the title of the film it references. According to Cary, the writers did a lot of research in order to accurately depict the Japanese language for the episode. For example, the three categories in The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show are written in Japanese.

In the scene at the seminar, a character closely resembling the mascot of Hasbro's Monopoly can be seen sitting next to Mr. Burns. Because the design is slightly different from the real-life mascot, the Simpsons staff did not have to pay Hasbro for using their character in the episode. The design of Homer in a Jamaican attire was very popular among the staff, and Mike Scully, the showrunner for the episode, called the design "great". A scene in the episode shows Homer buying a square watermelon, which turns out to be round and slips out of his hands. In the background, cars are driving on the left side of the street. Originally, the animators had drawn the cars driving on the right side. However, Tomi Yamaguchi, a Simpsons layout artist at the time, pointed out that cars in fact drive on the left side of the street in Japan. Because of this, the animators had to redraw the whole scene, and Yamaguchi received a technical advisor credit for the episode. The speech that Homer gives to the audience in The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show was originally much longer, and would partially involve kitchenettes from Broyhill. The design of the male Canadian in the game show was based on Canadian Simpsons director Neil Affleck.

The cartoon version of The Simpsons' theme song that plays at the end of the episode was conceived by composer Alf Clausen. Chuck Garabedian, the speaker at the seminar, was portrayed by series regular voice actor Hank Azaria, who plays Moe Szyslak among other characters. The Japanese waiter in Americatown was played by American actor Gedde Watanabe. Wink, the host for the The Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show, was portrayed by George Takei. Takei has appeared on The Simpsons several times before, and he is, according to Scully, one of the staff's favorite guest-stars. The episode also features the voices of Tress MacNeille, Denice Kumagai as Japanese mother, Karen Maruyama as Japanese stewardess, Keone Young as the sumo wrestler, and Karl Wiedergott as both Mr. Monopoly and Woody Allen.

Release and reception

In its original American broadcast on May 16, 1999, "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" received an 8.0 rating, according to Nielsen Media Research, translating to approximately 8 million viewers. On May 23, 2005, the episode was released along with the season 12 episode "Simpson Safari", the season 13 episode "Blame It on Lisa" and the season 15 episode "The Regina Monologues", as part of a DVD set called The Simpsons – Around The World In 80 D'Oh's. On August 7, 2007, the episode was again released as part of The Simpsons – The Complete Tenth Season DVD box set. Matt Groening, Mike Scully, Donick Cary, George Meyer, Ron Hauge, Matt Selman and Jim Reardon participated in the DVD's audio commentary of 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, gave the episode a positive review, and wrote that it was "A magnificent end to the season." They wrote that the episode was "thoroughly racist" but "completely inoffensive because it's simply very funny." Jake MacNeill of Digital Entertainment News was also favourable, considering it to be one of the better episodes of the season. James Plath of DVD Town wrote that the episode has "some funny moments." Aaron Roxby of Collider was more critical, denouncing the episode's dated references. He wrote: "I am going to go ahead and give this one the benefit of the doubt and assume that making fun of Japanese junk culture and game shows felt fresher in 1999 than it does do now." Colin Jacobson of DVD Movie Guide called the episode "mediocre". He wrote that, though the episode's concept should "open up lots of interesting possibilities", it "doesn't explore them particularly well". While he did not consider it to be a bad episode, he thought it "fail[ed] to live up to its potential".

Banning in Japan

Although all other episodes of The Simpsons have been dubbed and broadcast on Japanese television, "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo" has never aired in Japan. The reasoning behind this was that a scene in the episode, which shows Homer throwing Akihito, the current emperor of Japan, into a box filled with sumo thongs, was considered disrespectful. There was also a rumor that Sanrio objected to the portrayal of the Hello Kitty factory featured briefly in the episode. The episode has become study material for sociology courses at University of California Berkeley, where it is used to "examine issues of the production and reception of cultural objects, in this case, a satirical cartoon show", and to figure out what it is "trying to tell audiences about aspects primarily of American society, and, to a lesser extent, about other societies".