"The Otto Show" is a decent episode that sees Otto lose his job as a bus driver and move in with the Simpsons. While this episode has some solid humour mixed in, I found the plot for this one rather forgettable, with Otto not being an interesting character. The scenes involving Spinal Tap were pretty good, though.
Overall, fair episode.
This was the first episode I watched of The Simpsons
[7.3/10] It’s funny, the show basically reduced Otto to being a tertiary character and walking drugs joke, that I almost forget they gave him an entire episode. I don’t know that Otto’s a character with enough depth to really do more than what they did here, but it works as a fun little look in the burnout’s life.
For one thing, it gives us a great cameo from Spinal Tap, with Harry Shearer pulling more than his usual double duty. There’s lots of the great rock concert parody material you’d expect with Spinal Tap in the house, from Homer’s hearing loss, to insulting the neighboring town, to the oblivious statements about no one benefitting from the fall of communism more than them, to telling the audience that they’re the sixth member of the band to try to create a “spark in their gray little lives” to “Goodnight Springton, there will be no encores,” to a riot while Homer obliviously sits in a car. (That’s a lot!) The opening act is just a tight seven minutes of Rock concert-related hilarity.
Once the episode kicks into gear on the Otto story, it’s still pretty funny, though admittedly a little less so. Otto’s utter incompetence at everything, from asking Patty if she was born a man at his driving test, to annoying the people who allow him to live with them, creates some amusement. Despite the compressed storytelling from how much runtime the Spinal Tap stuff takes, “The Otto Show” tells a tidy little story.
On the one hand, you have Otto’s travails where he gets fired, can’t pass his driving test so is forced to move in with The Simpsons, only to be able to pass when he and Patty bond over their shared disdain for Homer. (Something the episode subtly sets up in a very nice fashion.) At the same time, you have a great subplot of Skinner learning that Otto has a place given how deranged you have to be to actually survive traffic.
On top of that, there’s bits of the show’s cynicism that peek through, like Homer’s faux-wise heart-to-heart with his son about how if something’s hard, it’s not worth doing, so let’s just watch T.V. At the same time, his willingness to take in Otto so long as he can treat him like dirt is such an amusing commentary on what low social status Homer values. And even goofy stuff like him “proving” that Maggie’s toy guitar is a “real guitar” by bonking it on her crib and then on his own head cracked me up.
Overall, everything here is solid and funny. There’s little to put it over the top, but the laughs are definitely there, particularly in the Spinal Tap segment, and the story absolutely works.
Shout by Caleb PetersBlockedParent2022-02-28T07:43:29Z
i initially thought Otto would be annoying as the main focus, but he's actually not that bad.
I'm impressed he knew that dumpster is a brand and not an object.