Have you noticed that Homer is a surprisingly good rock climber?
This isn’t one of those made up for the sake of narrative things, this keeps coming up in several episodes: when Homer gets hooked on Powersauce bars and decides to climb the Murderhorn, or when he tries to get Springfield into the Duff Book of World Records by building the biggest human pyramid, or when he scales to the top of a secret military installation to release his mom’s ashes. I’m pretty sure there’s some other examples too.
Besides the fact that Homer is one of the laziest animated characters on record, whose out of shape exploits are the stuff of legend, you’d think that if there was any kind of athletic pursuit he’d be good at it would be something like boxing (which he wasn’t that bad at) or arm wrestling (which he was also pretty good at before he gave it up to spend more time with his wife – why he couldn’t do both, I’ll never know), not a sport that involves supporting a great deal of weight by your fingertips. It’s just basic physics, not that the world of animation is ever really concerned about things like that.
In relation to the fact that Homer seems to be able to handle just about any task for at least one episode (being an astronaut, a costumed crimefighter, and a motorcycle wielding swashbucker) – when it appears in more than one episode, then it becomes part of the established Simpsons lore. When Maggie shot Mr. Burns, it could have been a one-off, but when she shoots Fat Tony and his goons after Homer does too good a job as chief of police, or rescues him from drowning she establishes an actual personality trait (ie Homer’s saviour) and as Homer displays an ongoing aptitude for climbing he’s at risk of being branded as such – and can Springfield really exist in a Universe where Homer can support his own body weight with his hands? This stretches the limits of Walt Disney’s cleverly coined phrase of “the plausible impossible”, meant to describe animation’s ability to defy commonly accepted laws of physics.
[...] Homer the Rock Climber [...]