COMING ATTRACTIONS, WRITER WATCH

The final segment of the upcoming Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode on November 5 will take a few not-so-subtle shots at the current conflict in Iraq as aliens Kang and Kodos (who are featured in every “Treehouse of Horror”) attack Springfield before the humans can get their hands on “weapons of mass disintegration”. The connection to the Iraq war is made obvious, and there’s even a line at the end in which a character evokes the actual Iraq debacle.

“Hey you know it’s been more than three years, maybe we oughta get around to acknowledging the war in some way” [TV Squad]

GROEN DRAIN

No, really:

Mr. Mann, whose subjects have included underground cartoonists (“Comic Book Confidential”) and avant-garde jazz musicians (“Imagine the Sound”), takes a light, zippy approach to his material. His main conceit is to have much of the story told by the hot rods themselves, voiced by sympathetic celebs like Jay Leno (a car and motorcycle hobbyist), the Smothers Brothers, and “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, with John Goodman as the disembodied voice of Big Daddy himself, speaking to us from the great body shop beyond.

[New York Sun]