Reception
In its original American broadcast, "22 Short Films About Springfield" finished tied for 73rd in the weekly ratings for the week of April 6-April 14, 1996 with a Nielsen rating of 6.9. It was the seventh highest rated show from the Fox Network that week. On March 12, 2002, the episode was released in the United States on a DVD collection titled The Simpsons Film Festival, along with the season eleven episode "Beyond Blunderdome", the season four episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", and the season six episode "A Star is Burns".
The episode is Bill Oakley's personal favorite episode, but it is hated by two prominent figures within the running of the show. That said, the episode is frequently cited as a popular one amongst the show's fans on the internet. Entertainment Weekly placed the episode 14th on their top 25 The Simpsons episode list, praising the episode's structure and finding the Pulp Fiction references "priceless". Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, called it "an untypical episode, and a very good one," naming the Skinner and Chalmers story as the best. IGN named "A Fish Called Selma" the best episode of the seventh season, but found that "22 Short Films About Springfield" was "good competition" for the crown. Empire named the episode's Pulp Fiction parody the seventh best film gag in the show, calling Wiggum and Snake bound and gagged with red balls in their mouths "the sickest visual gag in Simpsons history". The episode is the favorite of British comedian Jimmy Carr who called it "a brilliant pastiche of art cinema".
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)