the result of the who shot mr burns contest is wild
i wasnt like alive for the who shot mr burns stuff, i was born two years after the episodes premiered so i didn’t experience the contest and i’m just hearing about it now from the two bad neighbors podcast but like
okay so first off apparently they only took a sample size of people who called in, meaning that people all across america called in saying “yeah i think _____ shot mr. burns” and for whatever reason the people in charge of the contest decided they would only consider like 1000 people for the contest, and they picked these people arbitrarily
the problem was that in the pool of people they had arbitrarily piked, nobody got it right. there were people who had guessed maggie but nobody who made it into the randomly assigned eligible prize-winner pool did. so they sort of just decided to pick somebody from the pool at random instead of expanding the people who could win, for some reason? so somebody won who hadn’t actually guessed right
and then when they offered the prize, which was to be animated into a simpsons episode, to the person that they randomly picked, the guy went “eh, i don’t want it, i’m not actually a fan of the show” so they just gave them a cash prize instead??? which is nuts to think about because some guy who didn’t care about the simpsons took the time to call into the contest and then like. won.
also according to bill oakley and josh weinstein there was this one person on a simpsons forum that they found who got literally everything right– figured out maggie had done it, picked up on every single clue, basically laid out the entire second episode before it aired– and that they hadn’t been allowed to contact the person before the airing because it would have violated the terms of the contest and then after the episode when they tried to contact them to give them kudos and some sort of like prize or reward for being the only person in america to get everything right they just couldn’t find them or figure out a way to contact them
The IRL Simpsons House contest is more depressing to me because they spent so much time making an IRL version of the house and the person who won the house didn’t even want to live in it and even if they wanted to, according to some government rule they had to change the house to look more “normal” (aka not like a cartoon) anyway so like, all that effort was wasted for nothing
oh god yeah i forgot that contest but that’s absolutely depressing. simpsons contests just never seem to work out i guess
one contest i know off the top of my head that worked out exactly as planned was that one butterfinger contest from ‘93 where someone from new hampshire got $50,000 for guessing krusty took bart’s butterfinger lmao
oh right! yeah that one worked out fine, and i think the 2013 version of “who stole bart’s butterfinger” went well too, weird that the other two ended so badly
