It’s now been about two decades since The Simpsons was in its heyday, and at this point, lamenting the animated series’ lost transgressiveness is a bit like complaining that doo-wop music isn’t as edgy as it used to be. It had its moment of vitality, and now it’s for old people and little kids. And that’s fine—it’s the natural order of things. So, with that in mind, prepare to chuckle mildly at the 27-year-old show’s comic take-down of the newest tech fad that all the youths are whooping about.
This humorous vignette—which addresses both the sudden worldwide fascination with Pokémon Go and that awful recent Cincinnati Zoo incident—appears to be a web-only short, not a clip from an upcoming episode. The show’s 28th season won’t begin until September 25, and by then the world will have probably moved on to some other obsession, like virtual whipped cream or robotic boxer shorts. Now that Matt Groening’s baby is being animated completely by computer, it’s probably not all that much work to hit a few buttons and spit out one of these shorts so that the creative team can touch upon the latest pop culture phenomenon while people still care about it.