Time Flies

Tell Aaronson and Zykowski:

12 responses to “Time Flies”

Huggies

2 August 2010

Looks like they sniped this for that failblog:

http://failblog.org/2010/08/01/epic-fail-photos-this-should-be-happening-right-now-win/

Stan

2 August 2010

This is what happens when you go too explicitely into the future.
More subtle cartoons put a thumb over the actual date. And everybody’s happy.

D.N.

2 August 2010

Yeah, movies are like that too. We’re already well-past the once-forbidding futures of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (2001), “Escape from New York” (1997) and “Transformers: The Movie” (2005). Although we’re still some years away from “Back to the Future II” (2015) and “Blade Runner” (2019). When are we going to get hoverboards, self-drying clothes, flying cars and replicants?

In terms of internal continuity, though, I don’t suppose it makes a difference that “Lisa’s Wedding” takes place explicitly in 2010. Seeing as how Marge and Homer graduated high school in 1974 and married in 1980, Lisa was born in 1984, Krusty the Clown was framed for armed robbery in 1990, Prsidents come and go, Bart and Lisa are still in the second and fourth grades respectively, etc etc…The show’s chronology is screwed up anyway!
1. Stan
  
  3 August 2010
  
  Yeah, but the fact that this avoids unnecessary plotholes is still omnipresent here.
  1. Charlie Sweatpants
    
    3 August 2010
    
    I’m with D.N. on this one. The show has always been time sensitive, being coy about the actual date wouldn’t matter in the least. Take a look at the flashback episodes, those are dependent on a specific cultural moment. The mid-70s for “The Way We Was”, the early-80s for “I Married Marge”, the mid-80s for “Lisa’s First Word”. Having the fortune teller in “Lisa’s Wedding” say something nebulous like “in the early 21st century” instead of the specific “in the year 2010” wouldn’t have changed the fact that the time they were discussing would eventually come to pass.
    
    Way back at the dawn of this blog I wrote a short post (https://deadhomersociety.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/end-the-simpsons-4-cosmetic-consistency-has-its-limits/) about how the fact that the characters never age has become a hindrance since the world has changed so much around them. The basic point was that Homer and Marge are stereotypical Baby Boomers, but the show has been on so long that the actual Baby Boomers are now closer to Grampa’s age. Homer and Marge don’t work as satire anymore because the thing they were satirizing has disappeared.
    
    This is true of other characters as well, Skinner is a Vietnam veteran, but the actual Vietnam veterans are mostly at or past retirement age now. In the 1980s, when they created Krusty, there really were clowns on teevee for kids. Now? Not so much, Krusty’s become a satire of nothing. There’s no point trying to protect any kind of timeline because the characters themselves are dated.
    1. Cassidy
      
      3 August 2010
      
      Which – it goes without saying but I’m going to say it anyways – is yet another reason why it would’ve been good to end the show after season 8 or 9.
      1. D.N.
        
        3 August 2010
        
        Yeah, think of how many cultural references there are fixing Homer to the Baby Boomer era (Happy Days, Sheriff Lobo, Billy Beer, the “Disco Sucks” bumper sticker and “I Shot J.R.” T-shirt, “Where’s the Beef?” etc). I imagine that when the ages/histories of the characters were explicitly stated, the makers of the show never envisioned that the show would endure long past the point of rendering said histories anachronistic. Didn’t Zombie Simpsons attempt to make amends for this by re-writing the history of the characters, with that flashback episode showing Homer and Marge going to college and dating in the 1990s, and Homer being in a grunge band with Lenny, Carl and Lou? Christ, maybe there will be a new episode which updates Grampa’s army service from WWII to Vietnam, and Skinner will become a veteran of the (first) Iraq War.
        
        (Oh yeah, and in my last post, I wrote “Bart and Lisa are still in the second and fourth grades respectively,” when I meant to write “Bart and Lisa are still in the fourth and second grades respectively.”)
        
        Another thing: I think my favourite outdated-year moment in The Simpsons has to be the advert for Duff Gardens in “Selma’s Choice” (“Duff Gardens! Home of the Whiplash!…To be completed in 1994”), which was out of date about two seasons after it aired.
        
        Cassidy
        
        3 August 2010
        
        “and Skinner will become a veteran of the (first) Iraq War.”
        
        Kinda off topic but it’s actually darkly amusing how “everything old is new again” when it comes to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In the Kamp Krusty episode, Kent Brockman has a line (paraphrased) “Ladies and gentleman, I’ve covered Iraq and Afghanistan and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse.”
        
        When the episode first aired the writers were clearly referring to the early 90s war with Iraq and the 80s quagmire in Afghanistan (before the rise of the Taliban). When the DVD for season 4 came out (in 2004) the US was once again knee deep in wars in those two locations making Brockman’s line almost chillingly relevant again.
        
        I actually went back and checked the transcript for that episode online to make sure they didn’t re-dub the audio for the DVD release (I missed the original airing and never caught it in syndication).
        
        Charlie Sweatpants
        
        3 August 2010
        
        The line is, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together.” We really need to find some new countries to invade.
        
        Also, there’s this from 1992:
        
        The relevant part starts at 1:20, and the money quote “In this particular case, Saddam Hussein had challenged and questioned the size of George Bush’s dick” is at 6:20. New again, indeed.
        
        D.N.
        
        3 August 2010
        
        Much of Bill Hicks’ early-90s stand-up comedy re: the Iraq War hasn’t dated at all – you’d almost think he was speaking recently (if you didn’t know Hicks has been dead since 1994).
        
        Oh yeah, and I’m reminded of Sideshow Bob’s final line in “Black Widower”: “I’ll be back. You can’t keep the Democrats out of the White House forever. And when they get in, I’m back on the streets, with all my criminal buddies!” That line made sense in 1992, then it seemed quaint during the Clinton Administration years, when the Democrats were in the White House. It seemed fitting during W’s reign, and now it’s out of date again.