I’ve had an idea for a website in the back of my head for a while now, but I lack the know-how (or, indeed, the encyclopedic knowledge) to put it together. So I’ll outline it here, and maybe someone much smarter than me can put it together.
The basic idea is this: With so many episodes of The Simpsons, it can sometimes be tricky remembering which episode your favourite moment happened in. Or maybe you remember a few elements of an episode but you can’t remember which episode specifically it was. The solution to this idea is simple: A website that allows you to basically input what happened and have it spit out the relevant episode.
The syntax would be “The one where [character] [action] [modifier]“. Those three variables would be drop-down menus, with the options [action] and [modifider] changing to reflect the selected options in the previous drop-downs. For example you could set [character] to “Homer”, and then [action] would consist of a list of vague things like “joins the Navy” or “starts a bowling team”, or specific things like “gets stung on the bottom by a bee” or “dreams he’s a giant made of solid gold”.
Once you’ve set your three variables, you then click a button that says something pithy like “Find it!” and you are taken to a page that says “Were you thinking of… [episode title]?” and accompanies it with a short TV Guide-esque synopsis of the episode, the original airdate, the season it’s included in (with a link to buy the relevant box set on Amazon) and links to the episode on Wikipedia, IMDB, and whichever Simpsons wiki people actually use. If the thing in question occurred in multiple episodes (e.g. “The one where Marge gets a job”, or “The one where Bart falls in love”) it gives you a list of the episode titles, which you can click on to view the aforementioned details.
The coding of such a site probably wouldn’t be too difficult for someone in the know. The really time-consuming thing would be sitting down to watch every single episode (and the movie) and writing down everything that every single character does.
Anyway, this idea has been floating around my noggin for some time now, and I’m glad to finally get it out of my skull.