Two Swiss women have recreated Homer Simpson’s gourmandizing tour of New Orleans, snarf for snarf, finger-wiggle for finger-wiggle.
It took Janine Wiget of Zurich and Katrin von Niederhausern, who now lives in Stockholm, a week to duplicate the segment from the animated The Simpsons sit-com, which covers 54 restaurants in 1 minute, 27 seconds, Biz New Orleans reported.
The side-by-side video created by the 30-year-old illustrators and graphic designers has attracted more than 1 million views since it was uploaded on Aug. 23.
Tourism officials said that they are delighted.
“It’s priceless,” New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp president and chief executive officer Mark Romig said. “It’s hard to put a value on something like this. Hats off to these two ladies who created an amazing impression-building piece of art.”
The Simpsons sequence is part of Lisa Gets the Blues, which first aired on April 22 last year.
It opens with Homer telling Lisa: “And then you discover a thousand things you love about this city. Cajun crawfish. Lamb tagine” and on and on.
In Homer, Katrin and Janine Eat Their Way Through New Orleans, the women duplicate every action and camera angle. When Homer’s mouth is stuffed with French fries, so is that of the woman imitating him. When he wiggles his fingers over a platter of crawfish and corn on the cob outside Bevi Seafood, so does she.
“Homer Simpson is a man with great charm, but not the best manners,” Wiget said. “To get the right angles and positions, we had to sit on floors, lie on tables, eat with our hands and put a lot of shrimp and fries in our mouth, everything in front of the other restaurant guests.”
She said that she and Von Niederhausern, a friend since college, researched all the restaurants shown in The Simpsons episode, mapped them and drew up a detailed storyboard. In New Orleans, they spent eight hours a day going restaurant to restaurant, ordering food, setting up shots and capturing them all with a single mobile phone and tripod.
“Whenever we talked to the managers, they laughed and let us do whatever we had to do,” Wiget said. “We even had to convince one manager at Emeril’s to let us set up a table right in front of the entrance door because the sign was on the door instead of on the window.”
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