THE NEWS CLIP arrived like a perfectly wrapped present, like a GIF that keeps on “GIF-ing.” There was The Donald entering the presidential race, leading not with his chin but rather with his beguilingly pompous pompadour (“pompous-adour”?) — and that footage was soon followed by reports that the Trump camp paid people a few shekels to appear at his press conference-turned-the woolly pulpit.
It was all too comically fertile to pass up, “The Simpsons” co-creator James L. Brooks tells The Post’s Comic Riffs on Tuesday. The Fox show decided to leap on the opportunity by lampooning Trump’s plumage.
“We wanted to be able to make a Trump hair joke in a way that only Homer can,” Brooks tells Comic Riffs. “By going inside his hair.”
And so the “Simpsons” patriarch was deployed for the mission, which meant that Homer not only would get a few sawbucks to appear on that downward campaign escalator, but also that he’d have to get to the mesmerizing root of the matter — the buffoon drawn to the bouffante.
“We’re lucky to have a character,” Brooks tells The Post, “who can handle this with affection.”
And so, a couple of weeks ago, Brooks turned to trusty “Simpsons” producer David Silverman, who directed “The Simpsons Movie” and co-directed Pixar’s “Monsters, Inc.” “When we have something we want to make special, we ‘pull a David,’ ” Brooks says in hearty praise of Silverman.
So Silverman and his team got to work, sketching out and storyboarding a 90-second nod to the classic “Fantastic Voyage” in tight turn-around:
In the video, titled “Trumptastic Voyage,” Homer gazes at The Donald’s “ginger forest” as if the mogul’s cotton-candy mane has all the healing powers of the sun. Soon, the golden-gray tendrils of Trump’s wispy, “gravity-defying comb-over” pull Homer into a land of lost discoveries. It’s a Bermuda Triangle of mysterious beings, from Amelia Earhart (giving new meaning to “stranded”) to a hot nod to the new film by Silverman’s ol’ creative colleague, “Inside Out’s” Pete Docter. (Besides the Oscar-winning “Fantastic Voyage,” look for allusions to such other reality-bending ’60s films as “Planet of the Apes” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)
And in direct satiric hits at Trump’s own life, a “canceled” Macy’s card goes floating by within these immortal locks, and the campaign slogan is: “America You Can Be My Ex-Wife!”
But really, like The Donald himself, this is all best enjoyed in actual motion. So here, in full ginger-tinged color, is how “The Simpsons” counts the comedic blessings of Trump’s tresses, and mines the folly within the follicles:
The new season of “The Simpsons” debuts Sept. 27.
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