“Anger is what makes America great, but you must find the proper outlet for your rage.  Fire a weapon at your television screen, pick a fight with someone weaker than you, or write a threatening letter to a celebrity.” – Sergeant Crew

For the third summer in a row, we at the Dead Homer Society are looking to satisfy your off-season longing for substandard commentary on substandard Simpsons.  This summer we’ll be looking at Season 10.  Why Season 10?  Because we’ve already done Seasons 8 and 9 and we can’t put it off any longer.  Prior to Season 10, we watched as the show started falling over, this is when it fell over.  And while the dust wouldn’t settle completely for another season or so, there is no bigger gap in quality than the one between Season 9 and Season 10.  Since we prefer things to remain just as they were in 1995, we’re sticking with this chatroom thing instead of some newer means of communication that we all know just isn’t as good.  This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (embarrassingly enough, quite often on “rhino”).

Today’s episode is 1015, “Marge Simpson in ‘Screaming Yellow Honkers’”.  Tomorrow will be 1016, “Make Room for Lisa”.

Mad Jon: Ok then, you ready to get into it?

Charlie Sweatpants: Absolutely.

Mad Jon: Ok. So Marge as an angry driver first?

Charlie Sweatpants: Yup. Both of these episodes suffer from needless action endings, this one being worse than the other.

(The ending, I mean, overall I think they’re about the same.)

Mad Jon: Agreed. This one was quite crazy in the end. You know, Thunder Lizards and all…

Charlie Sweatpants: Wiggum calling them that is one of the few things in the ending that doesn’t suck.

Mad Jon: I also think the forced road rage video stood out as decent.

Charlie Sweatpants: The danger element gets resolved and then brought back out of nowhere three times.

First the Marge corrals the rhinos, then they grab Homer, then Homer escapes, then the porta-john gets attacked. It’s relentless in conjuring new dangers from nowhere.

Mad Jon: I guess it keeps the ball rolling until the clock could run out.

Charlie Sweatpants: Basically. And yes, I agree the road rage video is one of the high points of the episode. You can’t quite dismiss the feeling that Phil Hartman should be there, but it’s funny enough to make you be okay with it. The whole thing about anger making America great is fantastic from start to finish.

Mad Jon: I completely agree with the lack of Phil Hartman comment. That was obvious off the bat. I will say that I am glad that it wasn’t another recognizable character that they threw in there.

Charlie Sweatpants: Not in the video, but they did throw Krusty into the beginning in a way that’s really jarring.

Mad Jon: Yep

Charlie Sweatpants: I know he was the Canyonero spokesman, but what was he doing at the school talent show?

Another example of how they really started abusing their characters by jamming them in anywhere, even when there’s no need for it to be them.

I mean, literally anyone else could’ve been driving it. They could’ve put Flanders in it and Homer could’ve still been jealous.

Mad Jon: True enough

Charlie Sweatpants: Putting Krusty in there is one of those nasty little tells, just letting us know that they’ve stopped caring about a lot of things they used to care about.

Mad Jon: It’s easier I suppose. But like you have pointed out, it is a rampant issue.

Charlie Sweatpants: It’s all over this episode, and it starts right at the beginning with the talent show.

That in no way felt like a kind of disappointing small town school production.

Mad Jon: I know, I was really missing the ding-a-ling song.

  This act is over!!

Charlie Sweatpants: The Krabappel thing is the kind of joke that lets you know they’re just cramming in whatever. And then Chalmers is there doing a comedy bit with Skinner, who he supposedly hates?

Mad Jon: That was death.

Springfield’s educators are too lazy to even think about this kind of deal. Let alone put up the production that they did.

Charlie Sweatpants: Exactly. The show is being wacky and outrageous just because they can. They aren’t satirizing anything, they aren’t poking fun at anything, they’re just saying: look at our goofball characters being goofballs!

Even in "I Love Lisa" when Ralph’s bed ascends to the heavens in an elaborate stage production, it ends with Skinner telling people to buy orange drink for the long ride home. That’s poke at the haplessness of the elementary school that’s completely missing from this.

Mad Jon: It was the only way to recoup their loses from "Firedrill Follies".

Charlie Sweatpants: The best thing we got out of that was "I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."

That is a line for the ages: funny and endlessly useful.

Mad Jon: Yeah I can see that.

Charlie Sweatpants: It’s some consolation.

But that same "it’s okay if we cut corners with zaniness" ethos flows through the entire episode.

Mad Jon: From a whole episode perspective, I am pretty sure that Looney Tunes could have recreated this in 6 or 7 minutes, and I probably would have liked it.

The complete out of character-ness of Marge combined with Homer’s jerkiness is not overlookable.

Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah. The cartoon-y and television-y aspects have clearly shown themselves. When he pulls Marge over, Wiggum just launches right into the road rage thing like he knows its time to move the plot ahead. Even Bart and Lisa’s fight in the back of the car is exaggerated beyond what it needed to be.

That Marge could/would develop a road rage problem when put behind the wheel of that thing doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is the lame way it’s handled.

She seems to learn her lesson at the police seminar, but then she goes nuts again. Six seconds later she’s sad and repentant, and then she’s all rage-y again when she’s cooped up in the house.

  It’s just weird. The Marge from "Marge on the Lam" went through a slightly out of character story, but it developed. Here it just goes back and forth at high speed.

Normal one minutes, nuts the next.

Mad Jon: I get the same bored-to-excited Marge feeling that I got when she became a cop, but in that episode she still walked her normal line. This transition was a license for insanity that is so unlike her that my brain doesn’t process them as the same character. Rightfully so, of course.

I don’t really have much good to say about this one, other than the previously noted lines, and the one where Moe mentions that he "won’t even get sexual about it."

Charlie Sweatpants: Oh, there’s a few more things I like than just those. This is one of Gil’s better appearances, and Stan the salesman and his crippling balloon payment always get a chuckle out of me.

Mad Jon: The salesman was good, I forgot about that.

  And the phone call from Gil was also very good.

Charlie Sweatpants: This one also has Homer’s line about plays, and Eddie asking if he can shield his crotch and getting shot down because bears can’t talk gets me as well.

Mad Jon: Oh yeah, the outlet for anger was funny

Ok, still even with these and whatever else is debatable, we aren’t even in the ballpark here.

Charlie Sweatpants: This is very classic Season 10 in that regard. There’s just enough good lines and jokes to keep you watching, even as many things make you want to scratch out your own eyeballs.

Mad Jon: Agreed.

Charlie Sweatpants: Homer’s stupidity is getting way out of hand, characters start doing the appear/disappear thing; the structure of Zombie Simpsons is all over this.

I’ll also say, and this isn’t a complaint I make often, but this is one of the worst animated episodes I’ve seen.

Mad Jon: How so?

Charlie Sweatpants: I rarely notice the animation, but there are many shots in this one, of both the rhinos and the cars, that just look screwy. Objects seem to get bigger and smaller and they don’t blend in with the background as well.

Mad Jon: I suppose I can see that. Truthfully I wasn’t interested enough to pay that close of attention.

Charlie Sweatpants: I probably blame the writers more than the animators. A lot of these situations are too ludicrous to look good. Take a look at this:

Mad Jon: I see what I believe to be your point.

  Now that I have taken a better look I can see it, but again, that is more analysis than I had the patience for at the time.

Charlie Sweatpants: Up on the car, Homer looks as tall as they are. But here:

They dwarf the Australian guy, and that’s only like twenty seconds later.  Here’s Homer being carried:

He’s clearly bigger than the rhino’s head, but in literally the next shot you get this:

And the rhino is huge.

Mad Jon: Yeah that’s a pretty remarkable difference.

Charlie Sweatpants: Like I said, the writers are at least as much to blame as the animators here, but there are a lot of shots like that in this episode, and it’s a direct result of the fact that they’ve just stopped giving a shit about things being the least bit believable.

  Okay, I’m done. Anything else here?

Mad Jon: No, that was a good tangent, but I am ready to let this one roll over and burst into flames.

Charlie Sweatpants: Heh, the NBC thing took too long, but Homer’s voiceover on the credits isn’t half bad. Let’s go watch Homer be a jerk to Lisa.