Fifteen years ago, when The Simpsons was still on the air, The Critic had a scene set in the “Oliver Twist Preschool”.  Skip to the 4:30 mark:

For anyone who can’t get the video, here’s the important part:

Adorable Child Laborer: Sir, have we made enough Simpsons merchandise yet?
Cruel Workhouse Guy: Never!

Never, indeed.  Three years before that, The Simpsons itself made fun of its own production process:

Again, for anyone who can’t see the video (or in case it gets pulled):

Kent Brockman: I’m here live in Korea to give you a first hand look at how American cartoons are made.

Those two things and the overwrought sixty second opening from Zombie Simpsons, kinda the same or exactly the same?  I’d lean towards exactly, but that’s just me.

I found that second YouTube video via a smart post by Jaime Weinman at Macleans.ca, which was far and away the best take on this thing I saw:

Still, maybe it’s because I’m used to the Simpsons era where a long couch gag was just a sign of an episode that ran short (remember the dancing/circus one that was intended to be the longest ever? Now it’s not even close), but I’m not always blown away by these long gags. Mainly because they are just that, long, and I like The Simpsons best when it’s most concise.

[…]

But they already did essentially the same gag in the fourth season episode “Itchy and Scratchy the Movie,” and they did it in only a few seconds. The great thing about The Simpsons in its prime is that it could pack a tremendous amount of satire into a very short joke. Just as they could sum up all the absurdity of the entire MacGyver series with one line of dialogue (“Don’t thank me, thank the moon’s gravitational pull”), one shot and one line from Kent Brockman could say about five different things about the outsourcing of American animation to overseas studios.

Exactly.  The opening lingers on each of its little cruelties long after you’ve gotten the joke because for all its style there isn’t much substance here.  Yes they’re using cats to make stuffing for Bart Simpson dolls, yes they’re using a dolphin’s head to seal boxes, yes they’re animating in a sweatshop, but instead of moving along quickly and trusting the audience to follow things, they stop repeatedly and bash the joke into your face.

What ideas there are, up to and including the unicorn and the North Korean FOX logo, were from Banksy.  The wretched pacing and enormous length were all Zombie Simpsons.  Here’s Al Jean, revealing perhaps a little more than he should in his congratulatory interview with The New York Times:

Q. How did you find Banksy to do this, and now that it’s done, how much trouble are you in?
A. Well, I haven’t been fired yet, so that’s a good sign. I saw the film Banksy directed, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” and I thought, oh, we should see if he would do a main title for the show, a couch gag. So I asked Bonnie Pietila, our casting director, if she could locate him, because she had previously located people like Thomas Pynchon. And she did it through the producers of that film. We didn’t have any agenda. We said, “We’d like to see if you would do a couch gag.” So he sent back boards for pretty much what you saw.

Jean also talks about how little it changed from the original ideas he gave them.  What he’s essentially saying is that someone else came up with all the concepts, they just animated it and stretched it out to be about three times longer than it should have been.  Of course, Jean takes his usual talking points out for a spin as well:

Obviously, the animation to do this was pricey. I couldn’t have just snuck it by Fox. I’ll just say it’s a place where edgy comedy can really thrive, as long as it’s funny, which I think this was. None of it’s personal. This is what made “The Simpsons” what it is.

Jean’s done this kind of interview so many times I think he can do it in his sleep.  He even managed to compare Zombie Simpsons to Mad Men, a show the wider world actually cares about.  I thought that was a nice touch.

What makes this interview dumber than most is that the reporter, Dave Itzkoff, basically wets himself with fear about corporate backlash.  The whole thing only runs to eight questions, and four of them are about FOX and whether or not they were mad.  He says that he’s aware of the show’s history of mocking FOX, but I’m not so sure.

Compounding the misguided awe that this was somehow brave is the idea that anyone would care about this if it didn’t have the name “Banksy” attached to it:

Last night’s Banksy-directed "couch gag" that opened The Simpsons has been making waves on the internet today—not just because it was Banksy, but because the show basically eviscerated its own brand in the span of a few minutes.

I’m actually quite sure that it was “just because it was Banksy”.  This is the show regurgitating a concept from nearly twenty years ago.  If it hadn’t had his name on it no one would’ve cared outside of No Homers and the other Simpson parts of the internet.

Boiled down, this is typical Zombie Simpsons. They’re:

• Repeating something that was done better a long time ago.
• Leeching off someone else’s celebrity to remain relevant.
• Stretching things out to fill time.
• Masquerading gentle humor as actual satire.
• Unironically patting themselves on the back for all of the above.

Thanks to Dave for help with the links, and to reader Eric for e-mailing in the Macleans thing.