Snoop Dogg, RZA, and Common will star in an hour-long episode of The Simpsons, set to air next month.
‘The Great Phatsby’ is – as its title suggests – a hip hop parody of ‘The Great Gatsby’, centred around Mr. Burns’ doomed friendship with a wealthy hip hop mogul named Jay G (great joke). The episode is set at Burns’ summer mansion in the Springfield Hamptons, and involves him being forced into bankruptcy. Homer will take on the role of narrator, and the episode will also star Empire’s Taraji P. Henson and Keegan-Michael Key.
“We wanted the Mt. Rushmore of rap, and we got it,” Simpsons producer Dan Greaney, told Entertainment Weekly. “[Snoop, RZA and Common] represent different moods and different aspects of the history of hip-hop.”
“This was just going to be a regular episode, but the table read went so well, in a fit of passion and excitement and ambition and excess, we decided to supersize it,” Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman added. “And we haven’t done a huge amount of stories in the world of hip-hop and rap culture, so we just went for it.”
The music will be scored by Jim Beanz, the music producer for ‘Empire’, and will feature “a betrayal rap and a revenge rap.”
Surprisingly, this will be the first hour-long episode in the show’s 28-season run. As EW pointed out, The Simpsons famously ended season 6 with part one of the two-episode whodunnit ‘Who Shot Mr. Burns’, but that wasn’t aired as an hour-long episode. So there!
The Simpsons: still breaking new ground after close to three decades on air.
