If students have ever dreamt of ending a game of Clue with “It was Homer in the Kwik-E-Mart with the slingshot,” now’s their chance. Parker Bros., the makers of Clue, teamed up with Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening for a version of the popular board game with a new twist.
In a style true to both the Simpsons’ irreverent slant and Clue’s neo-Sherlock theme, “The Simpsons Clue” offers plenty in the line of board game recreation. The new version replaces all the old familiar Clue motifs with Springfield-based lore and Simpson knick-knacks.
Springfield billionaire Montgomery Burns is dead and police officer Chief Wiggum has a few ideas of his own about who’s to blame. In lieu of usual suspects, Mrs. Peacock and Miss Scarlet, the new version throws Marge and Lisa Simpson into the mix while Burns’ lackey Waylon Smithers joins the lineup as a drag version of Mrs.White, the fetching French maid from the original version.
Homer replaces the dapper Mr. Green, Krusty the Clown appears as Col. Mustard and Bart rounds out the new cast as the bespectacled Prof. Plum, but the new Clue’s Simpsons nuances don’t stop there. Every feasible aspect of the original game has been reformatted in Springfield yellow, right down to the peel-off notepad with Barney’s Bowl-A-Rama as a possible venue for the murder.
Rather than traditional tools, such as the revolver and the dagger, the new Simpsons version suggests a whole new array of arms as the murder weapon. This time, a radioactive plutonium rod from Homer’s power plant is just as likely as Marge’s pearl necklace or Bart’s slingshot to be the murderer’s weapon of choice. The game also allows Lisa’s saxophone to be guilty of the crime, which begs the question, how?
“I don’t even know how you would kill someone with a saxophone,” said Chris Francis, a biology sophomore who said he didn’t “see how that would be possible. Even if you hit someone with it very hard, it wouldn’t work.”
Presumably, the game’s creators demand players suspend disbelief before submitting to a match. In any event, a few other students weighed in on the concept of “The Simpsons Clue.”
“I think it’s really weird that The Simpsons are in this game to begin with,” said mass communication junior Ellen Napier. “What was wrong with the old Clue? I mean, are they gonna have a Seinfeld Candy Land game next?”
One student questioned the integrity of Simpsons creator Matt Groening for licensing his characters for the game in the first place.
“I really like The Simpsons, but I can’t figure out why the guy [Groening] feels like he has to do these product tie-ins in the first place,” said Charles Areaux, a finance junior, who was critical of Groening’s unabashed willingness to license The Simpsons to peddle commercial products. “[Clue] is sort of an old traditional board game with some literary history, so that makes it mildly classier than the Simpsons merchandising for Butterfinger and Burger King.”
Like it or not, it was Bart in Burns Manor with Homer’s poison doughnut.