The season starts off with a "Treehouse of Horror" episode spoofing Harry Potter, as well as having a segment where the Simpsons get a smart house voiced by Pierce Brosnan, and still another where Homer gets cursed by a gypsy and the only salvation is to capture a leprechaun.
A notable episode this season is "The Blunder Years" where we learn that Homer has a repressed memory and we find out exactly what happened to Smithers' dad and how he ended up in the employ of Mr. Burns. While amusing, it doesn't have quite the lasting effect as another episode, "She of Little Faith" where Lisa has a religious crisis and tries to find a new belief structure to follow. She eventually decides on Buddhism with the help of Lenny, Carl and Richard Gere, "The world's most famous Buddhist," you know, besides the Dalai Lama.
Like most Simpsons seasons, the Thirteenth is ripe with guest stars. Amongst them is the return of John Lovitz as Marge's high school prom date turned billionaire, Artie Ziff. It seems he has been pining for Marge after all these years and in "A Half-Decent Proposal," he offers the Simpsons a large sum of money to have Marge stay at his mansion for the weekend. With Homer needing some surgery to fix his horrid snoring, the married couple give the suggestion some serious thought.
One of my favorite episodes this season though is "Tales From the Public Domain." In this episode, the family sits around an old story book and retell a trio of classic stories, "Hamlet," "Homer's Odyssey," and the tale of Joan of Arc. In the first story, Bart takes on the role of the Prince of Denmark, Homer plays the ghost of the former king, Marge plays the Queen and Moe is Claudius, the usurper of the throne and killer of Bart's dad. In "Homer's Odyssey," Homer takes the role of Odysseus as he and his crew attempt to sail back home after the Trojan War, despite the gods' wrath trying to keep them away. In the final tale, Lisa attempts to lead the French to victory in the Hundred Years War as commanded by God.
Rounding out the season is a clip episode, one that features Stan Lee as Bart becomes an Internet star with his comic based on Homer, and an episode where Homer starts up a security service called Springshield, only to find himself in over his head when the police force is fired and he gets the whole town to protect. Of these three episodes, I find "I Am Furious (Yellow)" to be the best. That would be the one featuring Stan Lee as it pokes a lot of fun not only at comic books in general, but also Stan "The Man" himself.
The Simpsons: The Thirteenth Season comes jam-packed with special features. Not only does it have the customary audio commentary and deleted scenes, but there is also a slew of featurettes. One of the more interesting ones comes from the episode "Sweets and Sour Marge" where a Duff Book of World Records causes the town to try and break a world record. In the attempt, they form a giant ball and go rolling down the streets of their town. This special feature is about how they created the ball. Amazingly enough, it all came together by drawing all of the characters on a painted globe and taking tons of reference shots.
There are also two featurettes that focus on Ralph Wiggum. One simply goes through tons of one-liner and non sequiters that the kid says throughout the first 13 seasons. The other one goes a bit more in depth, but feels very similar and actually reuses a lot of the scenes from the first featurette. This was kind of odd, and makes me wonder if two groups of people were working on this project, they came up with different ways to approach it and just decided to put both clips in. While I enjoy Ralph a whole lot, this might have been a bit too much. At least they were separated by a couple of discs.
There are also a pair of Sketch Gallery features that show a couple dozen raw sketches of various characters, both new and old. My favorite though is a featurette that shows gameplay footage from every Simpsons game to date.
Like the rest of The Simpsons DVD collection, The Thirteenth Season is a must buy for any fan. It contains quite a few memorable episodes and has enough special features to keep fans entertained long after the season finale has been watched. Even if you haven't followed the show all that much, but know you like the series, this isn't a bad place to start your collection. There are only a few callbacks to previous events, and even knowledge of those isn't quite necessary.
