if it wont work, i will bet you if you buy that DVD remote that it will work, it upgrades the player and i never had problems running the simpsons season 3(or any of them at that)
I've had a similar problem before. My wife owns the friends dvd's and one disk out of the 4 kept skipping everytime she watched it. the disks were brand new too. I agree that the ps2 is just a crappy dvd player.