A young, up-and-coming Judd Apatow wrote a spec script for The Simpsons, and now the This is 40 director will be seeing his rejected work make its way to the small screen on the long-running, animated comedy next year. The Anchorman filmmaker spoke to Conan O’Brien on the talk show host’s web series Serious Jibber-Jabber and spilled a few details — which we spotted at The Playlist:
“The first thing I ever wrote was a spec episode of The Simpsons. After only five Simpsons episodes aired, I sat down and tried to write one when I was in my early twenties. And what it was about was they went to see a hypnotism show and at the hypnotism show, they made Homer think he was the same age at Bart. And then the hypnotist had a heart attack. So now Homer and Bart became best friends and they spent the rest of the show running away because Homer didn’t want responsibility and didn’t want to be brought back to his real age. So I basically copied that for every movie I’ve made since.”
It sounds a lot better than that Jerk sequel the funnyman wanted to work on. (Sacrilege!) We’ll just rewatch “The Little Things” episode of Freaks and Geeks for our Apatow, by way of Steve Martin, fix. Listen to the full interview after the break.