Cole Bryant: Hey! Okay hi — dude, I have been holding this in since yesterday and I cannot.
Zara Reyes: What happened, what did you find —
Cole Bryant: Matt Groening said — he literally said — they cut enough material from The Simpsons Movie for two additional feature films. Two. And only under five minutes has ever shown up on a DVD. Like, since 2007. That's the whole official record.
Zara Reyes: Under five minutes out of potentially three hours —
Cole Bryant: Three hours! Gone! And now fans are — wait, this is the part — fans are convinced there's this whole lost intro with Russ Cargill, Sideshow Bob, Frank Grimes, Kang and Kodos, and some ghost transformation sequence, and I need to know if any of that is real.
Zara Reyes: No but okay — Russ Cargill, the Albert Brooks villain, in an intro with Sideshow Bob — voiced by Kelsey Grammer — and Frank Grimes? That's like assembling every Simpsons villain in one room.
Cole Bryant: Right? It sounds incredible. Which is — dude, that's actually the problem, isn't it. Think about it like a photographer who shoots a whole roll and only prints three photos. We know the roll existed because Groening told us. But now everyone's arguing about what the other pictures looked like and nobody actually saw them.
Zara Reyes: And some of the pictures might be from a completely different roll entirely — which, yeah, we should get into that.
Cole Bryant: Okay but wait — a different roll entirely, meaning someone actually tracked down where the ghost scene came from?
Zara Reyes: Al Jean. On Twitter. He confirmed it.
Cole Bryant: The showrunner just — said it?
Zara Reyes: The Cargill and Frank Grimes ghost transformation — where they turn into a large ghost together — that's Treehouse of Horror XXVII. A TV episode. It got cut because the episode ran about 45 seconds too long. That's it. That's the whole reason.
Cole Bryant: Hold on. Frank Grimes isn't even — wait, he's not a movie character at all, right? He's from Homer's Enemy. The TV episode.
Zara Reyes: Never appeared in the movie. Not in a cut version, not in an animatic — no confirmed source puts Frank Grimes anywhere near The Simpsons Movie. The whole Cargill-Bob-Frank Grimes-Kang and Kodos intro that fans keep describing as a lost movie sequence? Nobody has confirmed that cluster ever existed in any version of the film. Like, at all.
Cole Bryant: So fans took a 2015 TV scene — a scene Al Jean literally explained got cut for being 45 seconds too long — and reverse-engineered it into movie mythology? Dude that's actually kind of insane.
Zara Reyes: And the part nobody's sitting with — the legend sounds more complete than the actual movie would've been. Like, Sideshow Bob in a decimated Springfield with Homer, Kang and Kodos in the end credits, Cargill everywhere — that's a bigger, wilder film than the one we got. The myth is doing something the real cut content probably couldn't.
Cole Bryant: The gap is more interesting than whatever was actually in it.
Zara Reyes: But that's the machine, though — the gap IS the machine. Because May 2007, they're still cutting. The movie drops in July. James L. Brooks said 70% of the trailer content got cut within eight weeks of a given production point. That's not normal for animation. You lock picture early in animation because it costs insane money not to. So now you have this genuinely chaotic production history and under five minutes on a DVD and fans who know something got left behind—
Cole Bryant: And they fill it.
Zara Reyes: They fill it with whatever's adjacent. A 2015 TV cut that Al Jean literally explained on Twitter becomes movie mythology because the search results don't care about an eight-year gap.
Cole Bryant: Okay wait — no, I want to push on something. The take I keep seeing is 'fans discovered lost movie content.' And that's just wrong. That's the framing that's actually spreading. Like, picture someone in 2022 on their couch, three Simpsons wikis open, they find 'Cargill deleted scene' on one, 'ghost transformation' on another — and those are real things, separately — and they stitch it into one post and 2,000 people upvote it as fact. That's not discovery, that's... dude, that's construction.
Zara Reyes: And Fox has released nothing in seventeen years to correct it.
Cole Bryant: Which — wait, is that on purpose? Like, does the myth actually serve them?
Zara Reyes: Lowkey, yes? No director's cut, no lost-materials featurette, no expanded streaming version — nothing since 2007. The mythology drives engagement without them spending a dollar. Why close the gap when the gap is working?
Cole Bryant: That's — yeah, okay, that's kind of bleak actually.
Zara Reyes: And we haven't even gotten into what the specific characters who got cut — Sideshow Bob, Kang and Kodos, the expanded Cargill stuff — what those cuts actually tell you about how unstable the whole antagonist structure was. There was a 2006 Comic-Con preview that gave fans a taste and that whole thread is its own thing.
Cole Bryant: And that's the thing about the 2006 Comic-Con preview — like, that's the one real window fans actually got. Someone in that room saw footage, right? And then the movie that shipped a year later looked nothing like it.
Zara Reyes: Which means the antagonist lineup was still genuinely in flux when they showed that footage. Sideshow Bob allegedly has Homer in a decimated Springfield — that's not a background cameo, that's a whole narrative thread. And no source I can find confirms what he's actually doing there. Like, is he helping? Threatening? Why was Kelsey Grammer recorded for this and then cut?
Cole Bryant: Wait — you think Grammer was actually recorded?
Zara Reyes: Reportedly. But even that I'd hedge. The sourcing on the Bob scenes specifically is — it's thin. We have the rumor, we have decimated Springfield, we have Homer, and then just... nothing.
Cole Bryant: Dude, and then Kang and Kodos had a finished end-credits sequence cut. Like, not an animatic — a completed sequence. That's — okay, that's a different kind of cut. That's not 'we figured out the story,' that's 'we ran out of runtime.'
Zara Reyes: Right — and those are doing completely different jobs. Sideshow Bob is a villain function. Kang and Kodos are a comedic coda. Expanded Cargill is — I mean, Albert Brooks improvised so much that cutting Cargill material almost certainly meant losing actual jokes, not just plot.
Cole Bryant: So you've got three different character types all getting cut for — wait, maybe three different reasons. That's not one decision. That's the whole movie being renegotiated.
Zara Reyes: And that's why the myths feel credible even when they're wrong. Because the instability was real — writers were actually testing different villain configurations, and fans can feel that in the seams of the final cut.
Cole Bryant: So what do you actually watch for now? Like, if you're rewatching the movie knowing all this — you're looking at every Cargill scene and thinking 'there was more here.' That's a different viewing experience.
Zara Reyes: My thing — the detail I cannot get past — is that the documented record has been nearly static for seventeen years. Groening said it, the DVD shipped under five minutes, and then just... nothing. No correction, no featurette, no expanded cut. That's not an accident.
Cole Bryant: Mine's the 45 seconds. Al Jean is out there on Twitter explaining that the whole ghost transformation — Cargill, Frank Grimes, becoming a giant ghost — got cut from Treehouse of Horror XXVII because the episode was 45 seconds too long. Forty-five seconds! And now it's movie mythology. Dude that gap between cause and legend is so funny to me.
Zara Reyes: And if a Simpsons Movie 2 ever drops a lost-materials featurette — or like, some Disney Plus thing surfaces the Kang and Kodos end credits sequence — do fans actually accept that the Cargill-Bob-Frank Grimes intro never existed in the movie? Or does the mythology just... absorb the correction and keep going?
Cole Bryant: I mean — wait, actually no, I think it mutates. Like they'll say 'okay but this featurette is itself the cut version, the real cut was different.' The legend becomes unfalsifiable.
Zara Reyes: Or they'll say the featurette itself is the cut version.
