← Triviagon · The Simpsons
The Simpsons · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every The Simpsons puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Answer #1 Hank Azaria has said the whole performance rests on one note of exhausted disbelief. The character exists because the writers wanted somebody the principal was frightened of, and a four-minute scene the two of them share in a 1996 episode - an unconvincing lunch of hamburgers - has outlived very nearly everything else the show has ever made.
- Answer #2 Julie Kavner voices her, her twin and their younger sister - three women, one actor, very frequently arguing in the same scene. The two elder ones were designed to be told apart by hairstyle and by essentially nothing else, and the writers have leaned on that ambiguity for decades.
- Answer #3 Tress MacNeille voices her. She began as a one-off executive in the 1997 episode about a focus-grouped dog being added to a cartoon, and the writers liked the type enough to keep bringing her back as whatever species of professional a given plot happened to require.
- Answer #1 It appears in one scene of one episode and has comfortably outlived most of the show. Homer finds his own face printed on a box of Japanese dishwasher detergent, writes to the manufacturer, and receives back a commercial explaining the resemblance as the accidental result of two corporate logos being merged.
- Answer #2 Hank Azaria voices him. He was introduced in a fifth-season episode about an elephant and given a caption across the bottom of the screen the first time he appeared, describing him in two hyphenated words that the show has used ever since as though they were his job title.
- Answer #3 It is where this show sends anybody it needs out of the way for a while, and it has held a clown, a sideshow performer, a mob boss, a bar owner and, on more than one occasion, the family's father. Its inmates stage a talent show in at least one episode.
- Answer #1 The animator who designed him took the face from Barry Diller, the executive running Fox when the show arrived on the network, and modelled the way the body moves on a praying mantis. The voice was assembled somewhere else entirely: two impressions, Lionel Barrymore and Ronald Reagan, folded into one another until they became a single old man.
- Answer #2 It opened in the Springfield Mall in a third-season episode broadcast in October 1991, stocked with scissors, corkscrews, tin openers and spiral notebooks that most of the town had no use for whatsoever. Its owner had walked out of a steady job to open it, and the neighbour he trusted most spent the whole episode quietly praying for it to go under.
- Answer #3 It exists because a gift-shop rack of personalised novelty licence plates failed to carry the one name the boy had gone in looking for, and carried this instead. John Swartzwelder wrote the episode, it went out in October 1994, and the whole joke is over in about fifteen seconds.