As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another. More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things. The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud. So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (though certainly not on “topwise”).
Even in an episode that wasn’t as swarming with magic robots as most of them, Zombie Simpsons still couldn’t get to its main premise without slipping into complete stupidity. I refer you to Principal Skinner getting a call on his cell phone from Bart and continuing to think it was a rich English woman for what had to be at least an hour. Certainly Bart has pulled the wool over Skinner’s eyes a few times, but never in such a way that would make you think Skinner is the world’s most gullible man. For this to make any sense, Skinner has to believe that there is an anonymous foreigner who wants to help the school by bidding on crap sight unseen, not recognize that it’s his most loathed student doing an impersonation, and ignore the fact that his cell phone would tell him that the call is coming from his own school. To be fair, they took care of that last part for him:
Skinner’s supposed to be one of the smart characters on the show. There was an entire episode where he was in Mensa for fuck’s sake. Yet here he is acting dumber than Homer ever did prior to about Season 12. Zombie Simpsons has cut so many corners like this over the years that there’s hardly anything left of the original show.
Charlie Sweatpants: You ready to get started?
Mad Jon: Sure.
Charlie Sweatpants: I thought this episode was slightly more sane than last week’s, but in a kind of screwed up way that makes it actually more painful to watch.
Mad Jon: Hmm, how do you mean?
Charlie Sweatpants: I don’t see any Earthly way you could make the Jack Bauer episode work. When your main story is a man haunted by his past who kills two dozen people I just don’t think it’s going to be funny, period.
Mad Jon: Ok, I am with you so far.
Charlie Sweatpants: But "Chalmers takes an interest in Bart" isn’t inherently insane. Twelve years ago they might have made this semi-passable. But they can’t even do that.
Mad Jon: Yeah, I was thinking about that. I like how simple the plot starts, but it just doesn’t have the level of interest for me that I imagine it would have had 12 or 15 years ago.
Charlie Sweatpants: It seems worse because this feels like they’re actually listening to all the complaints and they’re still not even close.
Mad Jon: Turn it topwise! TOPWISE!
Charlie Sweatpants: The Bauer episode is everything that’s stereotypically wrong with the show: celebrities, Jerkass Homer, the whole shebang. This is very different, but equally bad.
There isn’t a single scene that doesn’t remind you of a better episode, and that makes all the problems (people jumping in and out of scenes, weird voices, glaring plot holes) that much more difficult to ignore.
Mad Jon: There were still several omnipresent Zombie attributes. So that sucks. Think of all the meaningless and boring scenes that just dragged on. Like when Marge buys the t-shirts for the other school and Homer stands watch… Or think of the complete laziness of the writing in scenes like when Chalmers declares the library is closing and then takes Bart horseback riding in a state park while it is quite certainly daylight still.
Charlie Sweatpants: The quick cuts to the national park were very grating. Half the point of the episode is that the school is broke, but Chalmers takes them on a very expensive looking vacation.
Mad Jon: Horses ain’t cheap neither.
Charlie Sweatpants: There are so many things that just stop you cold with how little they make sense.
Nelson just found the spectacles and then fell, where did that come from? Kearney wasn’t there and then he was.
Mad Jon: This episode without the construction paper background it was built on may have had a chance.
Charlie Sweatpants: And it ends with a guy getting kneecapped. Huh?
Mad Jon: The comptroller at that.
I think. It looked like him, but by the end I was more interested in emptying the dishwasher, so I didn’t quite follow the dialogue.
Charlie Sweatpants: Emptying your dishwasher was a better use of time than the ending here. How long was that little standoff supposed to have lasted? Was Lisa in the damn closet the whole time? Did Bart really take a bunch of hostages?
Mad Jon: I don’t know, there are too many issues here to even begin parsing them.
Charlie Sweatpants: The wild swings just keep coming until you’re basically numb.
Mad Jon: I will say that I liked the black and white Roosevelt/Moe scene. It went on too long, but it started well and what not.
Charlie Sweatpants: It did. The list of all the things wrong with the teachers’ cars was the same way.
It had far more misses than hits though. Homer getting money from his imaginary ATM wasn’t funny AND went on too long.
Mad Jon: Really way too long.
Charlie Sweatpants: The same is true of Skinner’s complaining that he’s "lop-shouldered" after being tortured by the Vietnamese. That wasn’t funny and it took forever.
Mad Jon: That was actually sort of depressing.
Charlie Sweatpants: First of all, a guy Skinner’s age wouldn’t be a Vietnam veteran. Vietnam veterans are in their sixties now. It’s really bizarre to see that in their modern Springfield.
Second, and this is much worse and goes to show how much they’ve lost the touch, is that his complaining was kinda bitter.
When Skinner finds his iron helmet at the swap meet he reacts to it like an old friend. It’s funny because he apparently took being horribly confined with the same resigned good humor he takes everything else. The same is true when he complains about the fact that they can’t get the spices right here in the States.
Mad Jon: I really miss the shades casting bars of shadows on his face.
Charlie Sweatpants: The terrible thing is made funny because Skinner is such a happy dork about the whole thing. His attitude is the joke, and here they dropped it and thought it was funny for him to be angry at being "lop-shouldered".
Mad Jon: Yep. And they dragged it on by bringing up a carpet cleaning company or something.
Charlie Sweatpants: They did that with a lot of things. This one really could’ve used a B-plot.
Mad Jon: Yeah I guess it didn’t really have one did it?
I am just now realizing that.
Meh.
Charlie Sweatpants: The story was so scattershot it was kind of hard to tell.
I thought the spectacles were going to be a big deal, but then they just found them one second after they started looking. The episode still had a ways to go.
Mad Jon: Yeah, Somehow Nelson has them and doesn’t announce it until he is hanging on a weed on a cliff side, because of _____.
Charlie Sweatpants: Right. It rushes through what you’d think would be the big moments and drags out these weird inconsequential scenes like Bart locking Lisa up.
Any other thoughts here about particularly good or bad parts?
Mad Jon: I didn’t like the couch gag at all. I used to love Ren and Stimpy, and that couldn’t have dragged on any longer, or made me any more uncomfortable.
So that sucked.
Charlie Sweatpants: I’m kinda neutral towards the couch gag. It took longer than I might have liked, but it was at least pretty original. I’m very apathetic toward Ren and Stimpy though. We didn’t have cable when that show was big so I’ve only ever seen like two episodes.
Mad Jon: Fair enough, tastes will differ I suppose.
Charlie Sweatpants: It does feel like a lame attempt to duplicate the Banksy success, but again, I can’t really bring myself to give too much of a shit.
Mad Jon: I can see that. I can also see you not giving a shit, but I used to watch Ren and Stimpy with my brothers a lot, and this opening made me feel like I was watching it on LSD. But you are probably right about the shit giving part.
I don’t really have anything else to add, except I do wonder if you are correct at all about the "…listening to all the complaints and they’re still not even close" deal.
But I guess we will never know.
Charlie Sweatpants: Well, I don’t think they really are listening.
It just sorta, kinda seems that way.
Mad Jon: Well, I know that they aren’t listening to us. They can’t hear us through the earmuffs made of cash they all have, but I have to assume that other people also complain. I am way too lazy to seek the other haters out, but they must be there.
Charlie Sweatpants: I didn’t mean us specifically, just the general fan complaints on places like No Homers.
Mad Jon: Ok, that is what I meant as well. I can see the jet-lag and beer acting upon my grammar and sentence structure.
Charlie Sweatpants: How much is jet lag and beer and how much is just having sat through Zombie Simpsons? Neither exactly makes the mind keen.
Mad Jon: Your beer/jet lag vs content point is valid, sir.
Dead Homer Society 
11 responses to “Crazy Noises: Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts”
“…and ignore the fact that his cell phone would tell him that the call is coming from his own school. To be fair, they took care of that last part for him:”
But it just says “incoming call”, not “internal call” which wouldn’t make sense anyway given that he’s using a cellphone or have I misunderstood?
Usually I agree with your points, but the cell phone thing … can’t a person just Star-67 and it blocks the number out? In fact, I think it some cases, you have to *67 three times to completely block your number. The fact that they were calling from a PAYPHONE is slightly more odd, since I don’t see payphones ANYWHERE anymore, so I’m not sure how a small town like Springfield could afford putting a payphone in an elementary school that has budget issues. But oh well.
“I’m very apathetic toward Ren and Stimpy though. We didn’t have cable when that show was big so I’ve only ever seen like two episodes.” I dunno if this will change your opinion, but from season 3 onwards, the show was handed to a completely different company, with completely different animators/storytellers/etc. It was worse-than-Zombie-Simpsons bad for most episodes, despite a gem here or there (which were surely holdovers from other seasons). But the first 2 seasons are genius. Some of the most unique and funny shit ever aired. I highly reccomend it, you can probably get the DVD for a few bucks at a pawn shop now… Just watch “Sven Hoek” or “Space Madness” sometime. The artistry of the backgrounds, the oddly unsettling atmosphere, the highly unique and genuinely interesting labored animation, and so on and so forth. Check it out.
“They can’t hear us through the earmuffs made of cash they all have”
Maybe they’re actually wearing hamburger earmuffs? Or are they still struggling with the pickle matrix?
I agree about Ren & Stimpy…the first 2 seasons were the best–not too soft (post-John K. on Nick) but not the too-sick-for-its-own-good Adult Party Cartoon. “Sven Hoek” is perhaps my favorite episode.
IMHO I liked the John K. opening–it did last too long–but it was something, you know, different, something that Zombie Simpsons has sorely lacked for at least 5 years. It’s easily the best part of Season 23, if you ask me, because there’s actual thought and effort put into the whole thing; you can’t quite say the same about any episode in this season.
While John K. is a douchebag (he said that The Simpsons succeeded in spite of its writing–around Seasons 3-4–and thinks that all animation should be laboriously done*), he is talented and good at what he does. I’m surprised that Greoning and Jean came to him and asked him to do an opening, after the different pot-shots each side has taken at the other in the early-mid 1990s, but after being on the air 10+ years longer than you should, you can get pretty desperate and be willing to bury the hatchet if means more attention.
*Which lead to episodes not being done on time and hence his being tossed out at Nickelodeon. This is, I’ve heard, one reason why Adult Party Cartoon was canceled after only 4 episodes.
“But it just says “incoming call”, not “internal call” which wouldn’t make sense anyway given that he’s using a cellphone or have I misunderstood?”
“can’t a person just Star-67 and it blocks the number out? In fact, I think it some cases, you have to *67 three times to completely block your number. The fact that they were calling from a PAYPHONE is slightly more odd, since I don’t see payphones ANYWHERE anymore,”
I didn’t mean to get bogged down in the minutia of how the phone works, it’s only one of a whole bunch of things that don’t make sense with that scene. Aside from the phone and the other things I mentioned:
– Did no one else at the auction think this was even a little bit strange?
– When they show Bart making the call, Skinner is clearly visible in the background. So all Skinner – or anyone else – would have to do is look and they could see Bart making the call.
– How would it make sense to them that someone in England would want a “Shirtless Lawn Mowing” in Springfield?
The stupidities pile up and compound one another to the point that for this to be even the least bit plausible we have to believe that Skinner, the teachers, and a ton of parents, including relatively “smart” characters like the Hibberts, Marge, and Sideshow Mel (who was there for whatever reason), are all equally knuckle draggingly dimwitted.
I just thought the picture of the phone was telling. It says “Incoming Call”, but there’s no hint of identification or even attempt at identification of who the caller is. They designed the phone that way as a cheat around how dumb it is that Skinner wouldn’t know it was Bart by the number, which means they’re aware of how impossibly unbelievable all of this is. Knowing that, they went ahead and did it anyway. My point is just that they get how ridiculous their setups are, they just don’t care.
I didn’t know a TV person like Sideshow Mel had time for school auctions :S GOD DAMN IT! the early 00’s episodes are looking pretty good now :/
Good points, you’re right about all that…
So, I wanted to add to my original point, even if there was no identification of the caller on the cellphone, it still would’ve said “Unknown number” or something ABOVE “Incoming call”. The fact that it ONLY says “Incoming call” sums it up.
They could attempt to modernize Skinner to have him have first Iraq War (we are now a very similar time after the first Iraq war as the early Simpsons were after the Vietnam War) flashbacks, or have him been in the reserves and served in Kosvo or Afghanistan.
But that would probably be too big of a shift and too difficult to do; so I hope they don’t try that.
I loved the couch gag. Really memorable and well animated. I’ll admit I was sorta hostile towards it at first but a couple of rewatches have won me over. It has some really expressive animation which we rarely see in the show nowadays, so it was really refreshing to watch. Though I can understand the dislike for it.
I still like the Simpsons. I’ve only watched a handful of episodes of “Family Guy”, “Bob’s Burgers”, etc… and found them extremely retarded.
Love seeing your Simpsons stuff. Let us know what you think about the great fictional products the Simpsons have put out over the years.
http://thedagoblog.com/2011/10/13/the-funniest-fictional-commercials/
Oh look, I’m leaving a comment! That makes your blog much more important now, doesn’t it?
-T. Roosevelt