"The Homer They Fall" is the third episode of the eighth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 10, 1996.
Production
thumb|Character Lucius Sweet is a parody of boxing promoter [[Don King (boxing promoter)|Don King.]]
The episode was written by Jonathan Collier, who is a huge boxing fan. A lot of the scenes involving Homer fighting hobos were pitched by John Swartzwelder. Lucius Sweet is a parody of boxing promoter Don King, and is voiced by Paul Winfield, who had previously played King in HBO's 1995 biopic Tyson. In the script, Sweet was described as "A Don King type who looks and sounds exactly like Don King". The similarity is even pointed out by Homer with the line, "He is exactly as rich and as famous as Don King – and he looks just like him, too!" King was asked to guest star but turned the part down. Whenever designing rooms, Kirkland tries to show a bare lightbulb because he feels that it makes things more depressing.
Cultural references
The title is a reference to the Humphrey Bogart film The Harder They Fall. The episode opens with a parody of Bonanza.
In response to the season fourteen episode "Barting Over", which is about skateboarding, Raju Mudhar of the Toronto Star listed what he thought were "excellent" episodes of The Simpsons and scenes also related to sports. He included "The Homer They Fall", writing that Drederick Tatum is "a thinly veiled Mike Tyson parody who's made cameos over the years".
Similarly, in 2004 ESPN.com released a list of the Top 100 Simpsons sport moments, ranking the entire episode at #2, saying, "Greatest sports introduction ever: In the Tatum fight, Homer is introduced as the Brick Hithouse (and is also known as the Southern Dandy), and his walk-to-the-ring music is 'Why Can't We Be Friends? Drederick Tatum was placed at the eighteenth spot on the list. Conversely, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Gary Russell and Gareth Roberts, called it "the dullest, one-joke episode of the entire series".