The Simpsons Just Had One Of The Show’s Best Couch Gags In Years

The Simpsons just premiered an extra-long Disney+ exclusive, and it begins with one of the best couch gags the show has had in years, thanks to Meow Wolf. The 806th and 807th episodes of The Simpsons, “Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition”, premiered on June 17, 2026, exclusively on Disney+.

The episode sees Homer and Marge on a date, only for the night to end in an argument when Marge discovers that Homer left the kids in the care of a doorbell camera, and is rude to the other couples on the date. It’s the setup for a Simpsons anthology episode, with Marge imagining things if Homer were a completely different person.

As is expected for a special, “Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition” begins with a new couch gag, this one brought to us by the artists of Meow Wolf, an American arts and entertainment company founded in Santa Fe that has several large, interactive venues throughout the American West.

One of their installations is a Las Vegas staple, Omega Mart, a supermarket that appears to be set in some sort of alternate reality where you can shop for “Oh, Those.”, cereal with marshmallows in the shapes of everyday objects like staplers; “Mammoth Chunks”, “Dehydrated Water”; and “Omega Soda”, which claims to have ended the soda wars.

In the couch gag, Marge grabs Maggie off her supermarket conveyor belt, per usual, but is surprised to find a glowing bottle of Omega Soda, which transports her through a refrigerator door to the weird and mysterious world of Meow Wolf. Omega Mart is the main reference, but there are allusions to Meow Wolf’s other installations, like Radio Tave in Houston, Texas, a multisensory sound experience; and Convergence Station in Denver, Colorado, an interdimensional transit authority with a secret story about a missing traveler.

Meow Wolf’s Couch Gag Ranks High Among The Simpsons’ Best

Credit: Emily Montoya, Meow Wolf

Meow Wolf-heads will certainly find other Easter Eggs sprinkled throughout, but even those unfamiliar will be impressed by the creative visuals and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gags. What really elevates the couch gag is the second half of the intro, when a gaggle of live-action people dressed in full-body yellow suits, black balloon hair in the style of Otto, and rollerblades, arrive.

The team, likely the real Meow Wolf artists, quickly builds a junkyard version of the Simpsons’ house with pallets and cardboard for a couch; bowling pins, traffic cones, and yellow springs for the family; and a sparkly television that a hand comes to crank like an old-style car window to get the credits literally rolling.

This Meow Wolf couch gag is up there with some of the best of the series, which many seasons ago decided that the opening intro was the perfect canvas for illustrators and artists from all corners to put their spin on the indelible sequence. Banksy, Bill Plympton, Guillermo del Toro, Don Hertzfeldt, Sylvain Chomet, and many other talented artists and directors have fashioned a Simpsons intro in their own image.

The best of these gags produces something unexpected and forces you to rewatch it over and over to get everything. The Meow Wolf intro demands repeat viewings. The Meow Wolf art installations are filled with secret lore and storylines that you can follow and solve, or ignore and still have a great time.

Like the installations, the Meow Wolf intro sequence has more than you might initially expect going on, and it pays to go frame by frame to find motifs, references to the series, and tiny gags stuck in every corner. The Simpsons always seems to be on the lookout for a way to top their most recent couch gag, and that will be a tall order for whoever comes next.

Release Date

December 17, 1989

Network

FOX

Showrunner

Al Jean

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  Homer Simpson / Abe Simpson / Barney Gumble / Krusty (voice)

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  Marge Simpson / Patty Bouvier / Selma Bouvier (voice)