Simpsons Channel doesn’t have a preview image for tonight’s looming waste of time, but they’ve been going through a staff change of late so I thought I’d check the official website just in case. This was a mistake. On the one hand you have good web design, on the other hand you have a spinning donut graphic in Flash that stays on the screen for thirty seconds while it says “Loading XML”, “Loading intro”, “Loading assets”, “Loading content” and, the ultimate admission of dumb shit websites, “Almost done”. After all that I didn’t find a preview image there either.
Anyway, here’s the official description:
Principal Skinner challenges Superintendent Chalmers to take over Bart’s education after one of Bart’s pranks leads to a school fundraiser debacle. Chalmers takes an unconventional approach to teaching American history which sparks a fascination in President Teddy Roosevelt. Encouraged by Bart’s educational renaissance, Chalmers takes Bart and his band of “Rough Riders” on an overnight excursion to Springfield Forest, but after a minor accident, the school administration fires Chalmers for taking the boys on an unauthorized field trip.
Meh.
Dead Homer Society 
27 responses to “Sunday Preview: Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts”
To be fair it actually sounds ok. Probably will be executed horribly but premise wise this sounds… dare I say it, good.
Yeah, count me in as one of the people who thinks that in the hands of good, motivated writers, this sort of thing could work. Of course, it’d be retreading a lot of already covered ground (“Boy Scoutz ‘n The Hood”, “Whacking Day”, etc. spring forth to mind), but the idea doesn’t seem nearly as fundamentally flawed as, let’s say, the season premiere.
Will the Simpsons ever end I wonder?
I mean, the whole reason a person watches a TV show is to find out how it ends. If I wanted a long, boring story with no point to it, I have my life
[yawns] fuck that shit i’ll only be watching the hurricane special tonight
So, a homeless man’s Whacking Day without any whacking? meh.
Looks like they’ll be butchering an actually-pretty-decent premise.
Sucks there’s no promo image to bloody up. Ah well, can’t always have what you want.
Oh boy, John K. If there’s anyone in TV land who’s deteriorated as dramatically as The Simpsons, it’s him.
Skinner stood up to Chalmers? Great start. If he kills his mother, I’ll call this the episode of the decade.
This isn’t horrible so far. In fact, if it ends with with Skinner firing Sideshow Mel out of a cannon directly at his mother so that both are killed instantly, I’ll give it the official best of the decade nod.
This episode was better than last week, I’ll give it that. There were some good moments (Chalmers in general, Homer in the treehouse, Abe liking Colbert because he doesn’t get the joke), but the episode could be summed up like such: DULL.
You have Teddy Roosevelt (albeit mostly serving as a macguffin in this story), one of the most badass presidents of all time, and Bart learning about him was dull. There’s lots of potential with him, and much of it was squandered.
I have to point out that Comptroller Atkins pretty much appeared out of nowhere at the end. The writers/animators couldn’t stick him into the crowd before he was supposed to impact the plot? Or did I miss him before his big scene?
A lot of things were once again wrong with this episode: an ambulance appeared on the site right away this guy got shot in the knee. And nobody asked him to stand there, plus it’s as if he was negotiating whether or not rehire Chalmers, which he was obviously not. Once again – very sluggish narrative, lazy scripting (one or two guys talk and the rest of the scene just wait in the corner, like teacher’s lounge… wtf, this is not a theater people), and undeveloped progression, etc. etc.
But I agree, it was generally better than last week. At least here we get to find out Chalmers doesn’t live at the school =)
http://stonedsimpsons.tumblr.com/post/10969486501/why-you-little-doh-if-the-video-keeps-starting
Yeah, as a lot of the comments are saying, this is certainly better-than-usual for Zombie Simpsons: it’s not premised around a gimmicky flavor-of-the-month guest star; it’s not a lazy string of pop culture-referencing cutaways; and it’s not aggressively nonsensical or offensive. It’s just kind of BLAH.
Still, if Season 23 continues in this vein, it could be somewhat watchable. This week’s jokes were much less stretched-out than usual, too. (My favorite laugh-out-loud moment of the episode was Dolph’s “The dude really knew how to rock some jodhpurs!”)
That said, the John K. couch gag topped everything the episode itself had to offer. Original, surreal, refreshing, and funny. Good for ZS, though, for giving K. (that genius) some publicity!
Wow, the John K. opening was AWESOME. I honestly think it’s the best thing The Simpsons has aired in Zombiedom (the first 5 minutes of “Squirt and the Whale”, “HOMR”, “Weekend At Burnsies”, the puppet show up until the Katy Perry part in that X-Mas ep, the Banksy opening, Otto “watching” Koyannisqatsi in the otherwise-HORRIBLE Fat Tony gets married episode, and… uh… like, a line here or there, are about the only things I really enjoy past season 10 of the show); the animation was incredible, and it was funny and consistently interesting to watch. Ren and Stimpy is basically one of the best shows ever, so I loved it.. they really need to hire John K., or at least some people like him, some of the Spumco people, to handle writing and animation… this show just needs shaken up. I mean, the Spumco people never EVER drew the same facial expressions twice… John K. would throw out any drawings if they resembled anything that had already been done. He’s a genius, honestly.
And you know, it is just a perfect foil to the stiff, robotic, computerized, dull animation on the rest of the episode.
You know what would be incredible? If they hired someone like the geniuses at PFFR to do a whole episode. This show just needs shaken up, if it’s going to continue.
I didn’t find the episode BAD, just sorta dull. I mean, Bart’s already taken over the school before. Still, focusing completely on Chalmers was sorta rare, I chuckled when he said “DINNER” in the “SKINNER” voice… uhh… I dunno. The show isn’t funny anymore, so I just kinda rate it on how many times I shake my head at how bad the episodes are at this point, and I didn’t shake my head too much… I just sat and kinda felt bored by most of it. Still, that opening rocked. Damn.
I gotta say, Cleveland Show and American Dad continued being garbage, and Family Guy mostly sucked a lot, but Brian’s trip sequence was awesome too… So, basically, my favorite moments of the night were the more surreal bits. I’m a huge fan of surreal animation (anyone ever seen MALICE IN WONDERLAND? Highly reccomended!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2BAeh8wZLI).
John Kricfalusi doing the couch gag is pretty amazing – I’ve been following John K’s blog for years, and he’s made no secret of his dislike of “The Simpsons” (he didn’t even care for the show when it was good). But I guess if he was offered money and a high-profile gig…
Kricfalusi posted some sketches for his take on the characters here: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/surprise.html
From a 2004 John K interview: “When I watch The Simpsons with my family one night, someone said, ‘This is crap. I can draw better than that.’ They probably could.” Haha.
That reminds me, I always wondered what the deal was with them showing a Ren and Stimpy cartoon on the Simpsons episode “Brother From the Same Planet”. I mean, I think it was supposed to be a parody since I don’t remember that actual scene from the series, though it certainly looked and sounded EXACTLY like R & S. I always figured Groening was a Ren and Stimpy fan. I always loved the “Ren and Stimpy season premiere (clip not yet finished)” thing, which was amazing… John K. has ALWAYS had this problem, that’s one of the main reasons he was fired from his own show by Nickelodeon. (anyone remember the Adult Party Cartoon, which had, like, 6 episodes.. 5 of which had taken years and years to be completed?)
……For those who can check, what was Nelson’s line about gravity when he falls from the mountain? I was trying to think of it earlier, and I just happened to watch BART CARNY 30 minutes ago and when Homer falls out of the treehouse, he said “Stupid gravity.” I wanted to see if they re-used the same quote…
I personally don’t think that the John K couch gag was something short of amaring. First of all it went for a little too long again – just showing the family Ren&Stimpyized would’ve been enough. It’s a good couch gag but they let it for too long again.
Another one of those passages is when Homer pretends to put imaginary cash in the hat. Too long and pointless, it’s obviously another timekiller.
With all due respect, this episode only counts good for the past-Season 20 period. Would this air five years ago, we would’ve seen it with the same disgust as always, as to say how much the bottom of the barrel is scraped here.
John K is an overrated hack. Look, we all liked Ren and Stimpy, but the thing is, that cartoon had things like a ‘plot’ and was ‘funny.’ That was also twenty years ago. Nowadays he seems to think that all a great cartoon needs is just series of wobbly “ugly” caricatures with ADR fart noises/monkey noises.
I liked the intro alright, but the thing is, there was no point to it. It wasn’t a parody. There wasn’t any satire. It wasn’t funny. It was simply ‘what if The Simpsons was drawn like Ren and Stimpy?’ At least Bansky had a funny point to it. All this will do is inflate his overly huge ego even more.
Also, I haven’t seen the episode proper (and probably never will), but I like how the dumb couch gag is now the most culturally relevant Zombie Simpsons could ever hope to be (remember the ‘Tick-Tock’ one? *shudder*).
I was just talking to someone about this.. the Simpsons don’t change their music for 20 years and then the one time they replace it, they use TICK TOCK.
…What were they thinking?
As for the John K. intro… the point of it, to me, was that it was entertaining. Er, I found it entertaining at least… it didn’t bore me. Zombie Simpsons’ biggest problem is how dull it usually is, IMO. I mean, most episodes, I just stare as the episodes plod along. At least the intro was exciting, if however brief. I can honestly say it’s just about the most interesting looking thing they’ve had on the show in a long time.
I recall enjoying some of the spoofs in Angry Dad: The Movie, in particular the Wallace and Gromit one. It was a nice change of pace to different (and better) animation styles, although they had the typical ZS problem of just going on too long in general.
I don’t remember anything from the episode, proper, though. What exactly happened? Bart’s terrible cartoon won an award or something? I don’t know.
The important lesson is that the best part of The Simpsons nowadays is ‘Not the Simpsons’.
Exactly. I think Angry Dad: The Movie had a few decent one liners that made it (in my opinion) one of the better episodes of Season 22 (which isn’t saying very much at all, since the usual ZS flaws are there.) Frankly, if the best ZS episodes appeared in any of the single digit seasons, I’d still rank them as the worst of that particular season. That says a lot.
Well, the couch gags were never intended to bring it a load of laughs. Just a chuckle here, a snort there I guess. It’s hard to do a ten-second funny montage wth a family installing themselves on a couch without screwing it up. But what I really deplore is when it lasts a minute, doesn’t make it point, and seeing the production titles actually relieves you (as in phew it’s acutally over). The time of dancing ladies and elephants is long gone, yes that was funny before Family Guy copies the whole shit over, but even this won’t pass today.
This actually had more of a point: an exploration of ‘what if the Simpsons was animated in the totally opposite direction of the usual set of rules that restrict the animators?’. Not ‘what if they were drawn like Ren and Stimpy’, because this doesn’t really resemble the way of Ren & Stimpy drawing/animating at all.
Banksy’s just had a sadly misinformed point.
I definitely agree with this post completely. I’m a big Banksy fan but his couch gag stunt didn’t come off as anything too terribly clever, and in fact it kinda just rehashed an old Simpsons gag anyway (mass marketing OF the Simpsons has been satirized quite a few times, specifically in that rarely-seen episode where Bart makes “clever slogan t-shirts”…).
But yeah, I was talking to someone else about this… when animation loses its charm. Take Beavis and Butthead season one: supercrude animation that Mike Judge hates, yet the shows were more hilarious because of them. Early South Park was WAY more interesting to look at than the computer-based stuff. And finally, the Simpsons? While the “crude” animation of season 1 was definitely improved to a livelier and more watchable animation style for pretty much every season afterwards, it eventually became the same, cold, sterile, stiff, lifeless, boring computery ‘HI-DEF(C)’ thing that looks like every other show. There’s nothing wrong with a show looking “Good” — though it’s an obvious point, it needs to be said that there’s a difference between the QUALITY of the animation versus the ARTISTRY of the animation — but there is just no creativity with the movements. This blog alone has had many posts about this in the post, I specifically really enjoy the HOMER GOES TO COLLEGE animation showcase post… I mean, they don’t even TRY anymore, aside from an odd eye movement here or there.
And that’s really absurd when you consider that with the technology we have, we can do ANYTHING. I mean, there’s NO LIMIT to the creativity of humans nowadays. And yet, The Simpsons almost feels like it should be a Williams Street flash-based show now, with how monotonous and stiff it is (which may work for a few of those shows but doesn’t work here).
OH — I want to clarify: while I didn’t find Banksy’s stunt as clever as most people did, I thought I was cool that they’d have Banksy on the show in any capacity, hence why I’m sure I stated above that it was one of the only interesting things they’ve done in the past 12 years. “Interesting” doesn’t necessarily equate “good” of course.
Well said but at the same time in these HD days there’s no room for crudeness coz it’ll stick out like a sore thumb and that’s makes me feel more sorry for the kids growing up today because the other day I was watching the first dexters lab episodes from 1996 and the rough crudeness looks a lot better than the clear smoothness of todays cartoons (phineas and ferb for example)