Sunday 8 April 2018

Bjorn Again

You may know this story already. It's about the first-season Simpsons episode "Life on the Fast Lane", where Marge contemplates an affair with a French bowling instructor by the name of Jacques. In the original draft of the episode, he was called Bjorn, and was a tennis instructor, hence the episode's original title, "Bjorn to be Wild". Albert Brooks, providing the voice of the instructor, thought it would be funnier if he was French. Obviously this meant the original title no longer made sense, and it was briefly changed to "Jacques to be Wild" as a placeholder before taking on its final name.

Why, then, does the episode's UK VHS release prominently use the working title as an alternative title? (It also wrongly refers to it as "Life in the Fast Lane", but it's easier to see how that might have happened. This means the video gives the episode two titles, both of which are wrong, which is quite an impressive feat.)



It isn't an alternative title, it's a working title that doesn't make sense. The release in question dates to 1991, the year after the American broadcast (as mentioned elsewhere on the blog, this video would have been the first place a lot of British people saw the show as it predated the show's arrival on terrestrial television by several years); I don't believe there's an equivalent US release, nor any other official merchandise that refers to it as anything other than just "Life on the Fast Lane".

My research indicates that when this episode was first broadcast in the US, there may have been some confusion about the title; American shows don't have onscreen titles, of course, and with the World Wide Web such a fledgling thing in 1990 it may have been difficult to get word from the horse's mouth. If you look at the episode's capsule on The Simpsons Archive, seemingly compiled in 1992, it seems that whoever was responsible for compiling that was under the impression it was titled "Jacques to be Wild", and that it was changed from "Life on the Fast Lane" to "Jacques" (having originally been "Bjorn"). (Note that this episode apparently did not come to be released on home video in the US until 1997.) It'd be fascinating to know exactly how they arrived at that conclusion, and how the VHS ended up believing "Bjorn" was an alternate title...

Actually, there is one other fairly significant thing about these old videos which is well worth your time. It's that the copies of the episodes used for them are the original Fox broadcasts. This is notable because the later DVD releases tend to use revised copies if, for some reason, the episode changed between broadcasts. Hence, the original ending of "The Telltale Head" which was changed for reruns is intact on the VHS but not the Complete First Season DVD, and some credits which are missing from the DVD version of "Bart the General" are present and correct on the VHS.

This actually continued over to the later four-episode 'themed' videos: one of the episodes on the Too Hot for TV video is "Treehouse of Horror IX". As with many other episodes, this one is meant to have an extra gag during the Gracie Films logo, but an error in assembling the credits meant that when the episode played in the US for the first time the normal logo music was heard, and that is the version heard on the VHS. Interesting how there seems to have been some change of policy by the time they started releasing the episodes on DVD in 2001...

1 comment:

  1. An addendum: Sky still had this billed in their internal systems as Bjorn to Be Wild for decades afterwards; it was always listed as such on Sky Text, the Sky EPG, and on the Sky website, at least right up through the mid-2000s, when I started maintaining the Simpsons Archive listings page.(Not entirely sure when they finally corrected it..)

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