So there I was watching Simpsons episode 9F21 where Homer talks about his barbershop quartet - the The Be Sharps. It was a quite unmistakable take on the original fab four - The Beatles. But what I hadn't counted on was the amount of research the screenplay and directors had been willing to put into this (or the one I was about to undertake).
I am not talking about the storyline and the parallels between the incident of Pete Best or the arrival of Barney's japanese girlfriend. I am talking about things which you'd miss out unless you took pains to research yourself. Take the Meet the Be Sharps album cover, for example. Compare it with the original cover of the Sgt. Pepper album .
Then there are the stunts which would've been hard to capture easily if it were not for the fact that Simpsons was a cartoon. In one of the studio stills from the recording of Let it be, Yoko Ono is in frame and hiding behind Lennon. In Simpsons we see the same with the machine playing a Number 8 which is sneaky take on the controversial Revolution 9 soundtrack.
John Lennon became infamous for one of his statements which in more cultured terms could be put as - "music transcends all borders, even religion". But he had to brashly put it down as "We're more popular than Jesus now." - this and the previous statements about religion and rock-n-roll cause no end of trouble for the beatles. It does put the following sequel album cover (of the quartet walking on water, like the Abbey Road album) in context (for the Be Sharps).
I can't imagine to quantify the effort pushed into twenty minutes of comedy where all these jokes just fade away on the TV screen before two in a hunderd thousand note these down on a pad to laugh later. I just had the luxury of screenshots and dynamic pausing to actually enjoy these jokes interspersed in the actually story. Of course, it takes a hardcore fan to note down the Moe's *C*avern and that Skinner's prisoner number (#24601) is the same as Jean Valjean.
Simpsons, the Most Accurate Cartoon ever.
And I am a night bird.
Real computer scientists don't write code and therefore hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications).