“I don’t believe this. ‘I will never watch your show, buy any of your products, or brake if I see you crossing the street.’ Wow that’s cold. ‘Dear sleaze merchant’, aw come on, that hurts. . . . Gentlemen, the screwballs have spoken.” – Roger Meyers Jr. Happy Birthday to Alex Rocco! (Note: He’s a Feb 29th guy, so no actual birthday for him until 2012. But birthday wishes nonetheless.)
Month: February 2010
These Are Not YouTube Clips, The Story Matters
Our friend Stephen Frizzle, he of the blog post from last weekend that pointed out how much longer and thinner the jokes are in Zombie Simpsons, has written an excellent post exposing the shoddy “stories” that Zombie Simpsons pretends are plots. To make his point he does something simple and revelatory, he simply counts how long it takes episodes to get to their main plots. In the early seasons it’s a couple of minutes, by Season 16 it’s half the episode. He also brings up a few of the early episodes to point out how even when the main plot…
Quote of the Day
“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you Seymour. These drab student coverings have created the perfect distraction free environment, thus preparing the children for permanent positions in tomorrow’s mills and processing facilities.” – Superintendent Chalmers
Reading Digest: High Horse Edition
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user FaceMePLS. “Get to work! I want to see my face in that horse’s ass!” – Cadet Leader I tend to think of myself as a pretty cheerful guy. It’s certainly possible that I’m actually a bitter, resentful individual, though I genuinely don’t think so. However, this week’s links lend some credence to the bitter/resentful argument. This week I make fun of not one, but two Zombie Simpsons writers, look down my nose at Lost, strenuously object to a passing mention of Simpsons on a blog I linked to last Sunday, and…
Quote of the Day
“Do you have ‘Go, Dog, Go’?” – Ralph Wiggum (scoffs) “That’s in juvenile. This is young adult.” – Boy in Library “Well-read and just a little wild. Oh, if only someone could tame him.” – Lisa Simpson
Bart Bucks
This afternoon boing boing had a link to a page with a bunch of drawings people have done on currency. There’s George Washington with an iPod, Andrew Jackson as King Leonidas, and Queen Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. There’s also el Barto: Clicking on the source link at that page took me to Flickr user ChukD. He’s got quite a few of these including an actual Bart Buck: He’s got a bunch on there, with characters from Goofy to Batman to Dr. Zoidberg. Check it out.
Crazy Noises: The Color Yellow
“Oh, I know this story. The year is nineteen-aught-six, the President is the divine Miss Sarah Bernhardt, and all over America people were doing a dance called the Funky Grandpa!” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson In our continuing mission to bring you only the finest in low class, low brow, and low tech internet Simpsons commentary we’re bringing back our “Crazy Noises” series and applying it to Season 21. Because doing a podcast smacks of effort we’re still using this “chatroom” thing that all the middle schoolers and undercover cops seem to think is so cool. This text has been edited…
Bonus Quote of the Day
“The ventriloquist goes to heaven, but the dummy doesn’t.” – Sunday School Teacher “Oh oh oh, me!” – Bart Simpson “Bart.” – Sunday School Teacher “What about a robot with a human brain?” – Bart Simpson “I don’t know! All these questions, is a little blind faith too much to ask?” – Sunday School Teacher Happy 20th Anniversary to “The Telltale Head”!
Quote of the Day
“Ohh, look at that adorable spice rack! Eight spices? Some must be doubles, Or-ah-gah-no? What the hell?” – Marge Simpson
Crowd-Sourcing eBay Merchandise
Yesterday I came across a wanted poster for Grandpa Simpson for sale on eBay. As is my custom when I find eBay Simpsons stuff that doesn’t totally suck I linked to it on our pathetic Twitter feed. I thought most of the text was too small to read (image at right), but then Ryan W. Mead (sometime commenter, Twitter follower, and all around good guy) came through in a series of tweets with the text. He has better eyes than I do, a better monitor than I do, or both. Bravo. Full text is below (it’s pretty amusing): Abraham Simpson…
Synergy Wasn’t All That
“Alright family, I want the truth. Don’t pull any punches. Am I just a little bit overweight? . . . Well, am I?” – Homer Simpson “Forgive us Dad, but it takes time to properly sugarcoat a response.” – Lisa Simpson This was one of those rare weeks where the Zombie Simpsons episode was so bereft of humor, or even just attempts at humor, that even wholly owned News Corporation subsidiary IGN couldn’t gin up too much praise. It concludes by saying: “The Color Yellow” just wasn’t all that worth it.” Of course the numerical score is still a 6.4,…
Quote of the Day
“Burkina Faso? Disputed Zone? Who called all these weird places?” – Homer Simpson “Quiet, it might be you, I can’t remember.” – Homer’s Brain “No, I’m gonna ask Marge.” – Homer Simpson “No, no! Why embarrass us both? Just write a check and I’ll release some more endorphins.” – Homer’s Brain
An Unmitigated Crime Against Storytelling
“What happened to Mindy?” – Bart Simpson “Yes, what did happen to her?” – Marge Simpson “Enh, she hit the bottle pretty hard and lost her job.” – Homer Simpson “Hm, good.” – Marge Simpson I am not a big fan of Season 12’s “Trilogy of Error”. (In case you’ve blocked it out that’s the one where Lisa invents the robot, Homer gets his thumb cut off and three different stories all unfold at once.) But I do recognize that it took a lot of skill to weave three stories together like that. Getting all those little elements to drop…
You Forgot Someone (updated)
“Marge, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody about my busy hands. Not so much for myself, but I am so respected it would damage the town to hear it.” – Artie Ziff Today a website called “The Top 13” (they make – you guessed it – Top 13 lists) ranked the top thirteen guest voices on the Simpsons. The best part about it is that there is nary a trace of Zombie Simpsons. Indeed, this is from the intro: But as the show has changed over time, in our view the quality of the guest appearances has…
Quote of the Day
“According to Daddy’s will, I inherit the entire plantation.” – Leggy Heiress “I’ll see to it you don’t get apricot one.” – Strapping Heir
Bad, But Not Bad Enough
The numbers are in and last night’s flashback laden series of plot twists was watched by 6.08 million people. That’s not a good number, it’s the third lowest all season and it’s below what Zombie Simpsons was averaging last winter. But it’s above what Season 21 needs to keep its average viewership above the dismal 7.07 million viewers for Season 20. As usual Family Guy pulled in slightly more (despite being a rerun) than Zombie Simpsons and both Family Guy spinoffs did slightly worse. Depending on how many episodes are left (there’ve been 13, Zombie Simpsons seasons typically have 20-22)…
Quote of the Day
♫ I’m stuck here ’til I can steal a car! ♫ – Bart Simpson
There’s No Mystery, Zombie Simpsons Sucks
For tonight Zombie Simpsons seems to have completely forgotten that it’s nominally a comedy program, instead it decided to be a mystery show. Unfortunately it wasn’t even a good mystery show, with lazy “revelations” coming up like clockwork before each commercial break. Despite the excess of plot twists there was more stalling and exposition than usual. Take, for example, Lisa’s trip to the attic at the beginning. She got stuck with the attic door, Bart then took up a lot of time helping her. Nothing funny was going on, but it did eat some clock. Once she made it too…
Sunday E-mail Part 2
A blog called “No Pun Intended” has been, amongst other things, watching and reviewing Simpsons episodes from the before time, the long long ago. I’ve linked to a couple of them in Reading Digest but they deserves a little bit more attention than that (and they sent us an e-mail). Here they are discussing “Mr. Plow”, “Life on the Fast Lane”, and “Lisa the Iconoclast”. Tim, the guy who writes these, has a very keen bead on things. There’s too much for me to quote, but this response to a reader comment ably demonstrates that he is on the side…
Sunday E-mail Part 1
Last weekend we got an e-mail from a guy who is watching all the episodes of Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons. Unlike amateur publicity whore Glen Stott he’s not calling radio shows and bragging about something he hasn’t done yet, he’s simply doing it. (He’s also spreading it out over six weeks instead of stupidly trying to do it in one marathon session.) His Tumblr post about it is titled with admirable succinctness “Why The Simpsons Are Rubbish Now”. In it he specifically compares “Bart’s Dog Gets an F” to some trash from Season 16 (the whole thing is worth a…