“Listen to your mother kids, aim low; aim so low no one will even care if you succeed.” – Marge Simpson

If there is such a writing style as “corporate fanboy”, IGN has perfected it in their Zombie Simpsons “reviews”.  Even by the pitifully low standards of Zombie Simpsons “Bart Gets a Z” is an undeniable mess comprised of unfinished ideas, jokeless dialogue, and random outbursts.  I mentioned this briefly in the Crazy Noises conversation, but even individual scenes are so ill defined that it was actually a surprise when they cut to commercial.  It was self evidently terrible enough that even the paid hacks couldn’t gin up any serious praise, so instead we get the masterpiece of “corporate fanboy” you see below.  I’ve done my best to edit out the synergy, but if you want to skip all that it can be summed up thusly, “That wasn’t as excellent as your usual efforts, sir, but it was still a great experience that I’d happily repeat.”

Enjoy.

October 5, 2009 – “Bart Gets a Z” was a comfortable wretched episode of The Simpsons Zombie Simpsons. I’ve talked about this classification before, where an This episode of the long running series is neither enjoyably hilarious or incredibly terrible. It’s middle of the road, but it It has just enough so little going for it that a fan will enjoy the episode openly wonder when it will end and maybe even find a quote or two to add to their daily vernacular contemplate self-concussion to erase the memory. Come the end of the season, this episode may will hopefully be lost from your memory, but it was a fine half hour while it lasted.

There are a lot of factors that make an episode comfortable wretched, but having a familiar copy & paste storyline is at the top of the list. Bart got Mrs. Krabappel fired from her teaching job by purposely getting her drunk during school, which she didn’t notice for some reason. Of course, this wasn’t his intent, so Bart had to deal with his sitcom guilt over the situation. Eventually, Bart came sitcom clean and everything returned to normal. There’s a lot there that we’ve We’ve seen all of this before. Certainly Bart has put Edna’s job in jeopardy a number of times, and I won’t even try to count all the episodes where he has needed to right a wrong that he created. But you’ve got There’s no reason to cut the series a little slack, either. It is more than two decades old, you know? and fully half of that has been terrible crap like this. Heck, even the title of the episode is a reference cheap cut & paste job to second season episode “Bart Gets an F.”

It all started with Mrs. Krabappel becoming annoyed with the entire class using their cell phones for calls and games during class, which no teacher has ever successfully dealt with before. There was a dated-ness to this This bit was hideously dated, but there were still a few good no laughs, including Nelson demanding Martin text “uncle” while in a headlock, and Milhouse’s reaction to discovering emoticons was great wouldn’t have been funny in 1999. After Edna confiscated all the electronics, Bart got the bright idea that adding alcohol to her coffee would make her a little nicer: “My dad is a lot more fun after a few beers.” This led to one of the better longer and more pointless parts of the episode when Bart set the plan in motion: “First the easy part: kids, get some liquor!” The montage of scenes with the school kids sneaking alcohol from their parents was fun pure Zombie Simpsons: useless and tedious. It was the kind of bit that works best when you’re familiar with the kids and parents involved you’ve recently suffered severe cranial trauma.

The replacement teacher portion of the episode really fell flat in my opinion. The character of Zack reminded me too much of Jack Black’s Comic Book Guy competition from “Husbands and Knives.” [Ed note: Haven’t seen that one, don’t want to see that one] There was no guest voice for the role, which might have helped add a little something to the character didn’t matter in the least since the writing would’ve been rejected by a high school theater troupe. Even his His drunken breakdown at the end was more of a “Huh?” instead of a “Ha!” nonsense ending. The best line of the episode came while Bart and Milhouse argued over finding a way to help Mrs. K at their local bookstore: “I guess no one’s ever written a book to help a middle-aged woman turn her life around.” was when the Gracie pictures guy shushed the audience after the credits. This is where the The episode added a parody recitation of the film/book/life movement called The Secret. In this episode, it was called “The Answer.” (“Available wherever dubious, quasi-scientific self-help books are sold.”) I’ve never seen the film or studied the movement, but the jokes references were still worked well enough harmless and gentle, especially the history of “The Answer.”

Overall, “Bart Gets a Z” was a dependable an unwatchable episode, as bad as Zombie Simpsons has ever done. It gave you what you expected. It didn’t try too hard, but at the same time, it didn’t crap the bed with uselessness and just went through the motions. In terms of album tracks,[Ed Note: Huh?] this episode was filler. And personally, I’m fine with it, as long as the rest of the season aims for something more show ends soon and I never have to see this one ever again.