Cretaceous critters / SAT 9-23-23 / Decluttering method featured on Netflix / Slaves away old-style / Sporting event that started as a religious ritual / National Park in southwest Texas / Classic song with the lyric "Girl you made me love you And now now now your lovin man had gone" / Dutch city with a palindromic name

Constructor: Robert Charlton

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ROBERT I (35D: Father of William the Conqueror) —

Robert I of Normandy (22 June 1000 – July 1035), also known as Robert the Magnificent and by other names, was a Norman noble of the House of Normandy who ruled as duke of Normandy from 1027 until his death in 1035. He was the son of Duke Richard II; the brother of Duke Richard III, against whom he unsuccessfully revolted; and the father of Duke William who became the first Norman king of England in 1066. During his reign, Robert quarrelled with the church—including his uncle Robert, archbishop of Rouen—and meddled in the disorder in Flanders. He finally reconciled with his uncle and the church, restoring some property and undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which he died. (wikipedia)

Well we should probably start by discussing the elephant, or rather, the APELET in the room, because there's an APELET in the room, and what the hell? (8D: Small simian ... that's one letter away from a small computer program). This puzzle died at APELET. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to go on taking a puzzle seriously when it gives me APELET. And then the clue ... somehow it made it worse. Like, let me make up the word APELET based on [Small simian]. I'll get there. In fact, I got there, without reading the rest of the clue. I had the -LET suffix and wrote in APE half-jokingly. But it was a lot less funny when it ended up being right. And the latter part of the clue, where it tries to make make up for the obvious horrible non-wordness of APELET by doing a desperate wordplay tap dance, yeesh. "APELET ... it's one letter away from APPLET! Fun, right?!" Wrong. This puzzle had a lot of crummy fill—a Lot—but nothing to top the Olympic-level crumminess of APELET. How do you put that in a grid without cringing and going "uh ... what?" What duplicitous word list lied to you and told you APELET was OK? Even Eugene Tiberius Maleska, Will Shortz's predecessor and lover of all fill arcane and junky, only touched APELET once, and that was back in 1991—the last time anyone saw an APELET in the wild. Will Weng (the editor that preceded Maleska) liked APELETs a little better (he had two of them). Margaret Farrar (the NYTXW's first editor), by comparison, adored them. Four APELETs on her watch! But that was the cretaceous age of crosswords, there were only like 23 words in the whole Universe back then, so she gets a pass. This puzzle, today's puzzle, no, no pass. No pass for making APELET rise from the grave after (one two three four...) thirty-two years! You were APELET-free, Will Shortz! Why would you ruin your legacy like this!? smh ...

[Sincerely thought "McTwist" was a McDonald's breakfast sandwich at first] [1A: McTwist, for one]

Once you get one, the crosses and then the other grid-spanners start falling like flies. Top section was done fast, but then had some of that same initial slowness getting traction down below. Luckily DEALTINEDMEESE and RESORTS were all pretty easy, so despite not being able to drop into the bottom section of the puzzle in the SW or South, I was able to work those long answers from the back end. Not much else to say, except that 20A: Love, by another name was a cute (and tough) clue for NIL (it's tennisspeak for NIL). And is CORRIDA really a "sporting event" (33A: Sporting event that started as a religious ritual)? Tell that to the bull. Would you consider getting ritually and spectacularly murdered in front of a roaring crowd "sporting?" Seems doubtful. See you tomorrow.