“Ah, McBain, so glad you could make it.  Have a salmon puff.” – Senator Mendoza
“Alright.” – McBain

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 (especially on “Snuffleupagus”).

In general, “Stradivarius Cain” was not one of the better ideas to get barfed onto my television by Zombie Simpsons.  His only real trait is being an exaggerated version of James Bond, which is fine as far as it goes, except for the fact that there have been so many of those over the years that it’s hard to even count them all.  The first James Bond movie came out fifty years ago, and after five decades it doesn’t seem too much to expect that decent parodies need to be a little more than cartoonish villains and a hero who looks good in a tuxedo. 

The one dimensional nature of Cain is laid bare in the opening scene where we see his movie.  A bunch of goofy looking bad guys are having a meeting when one of them steps forward to ask about Cain:

Not Quite a Nazi Guy:  But are you sure we will not be bothered by the American master spy Stradivarius Cain?
Old Guy with Mustache:  Do not worry about Dr. Cain.  The last I saw him, my beautiful mistress was about to finish him off. 

That leads to the beautiful mistress doing one of those hokey old vaudeville overreactions where she’s surprised, then she realizes what’s happening, then she covers it up so poorly that anyone who’s half awake knows she’s lying:

Old Guy with Mustache:  You killed him, right?
Beautiful Mistress:  Yes.  He was the perfect lover . . . of being killed.
Old Guy with Mustache:  It’s a weird sentence, but let’s move on.

This is a great example of Zombie Simpsons just having no clue what its doing.  The scene as shown would be more at home in a slapstick comedy than a big action movie, but because Zombie Simpsons pretty much always goes for the cheapest possible laugh, they jam it in there no matter how strange or out of place it is. 

When The Simpsons did McBain, they played it straight ahead because they understood that the concept they were parodying was inherently funny.  They knew that just having McBain’s ludicrous arms punch their way out of the frozen Venus de Milo sculpture while he says “Ice to see you” as seriously as he can was already hilarious.  They didn’t have him slip on a banana peel or his enemy act the fool because that kind of humor would actually have detracted from the satire and made it dumb. 

Similarly, in a different McBain clip, when Mendoza asks if McBain is dead, his henchmen doesn’t stammer or roll his eyes, he acts like a normal henchman.  What’s funny is that McBain comes exploding out of the conference table and tosses Mendoza out a high rise window to plummet to his death and detonate a conveniently placed tanker truck labeled simply “Gasoline”.  When parodying terrible films like those insane 1980s/1990s action movies (and there have been a lot of terrible James Bond movies), you don’t need schtick.  They’re so nuts already that all you need to turn them from action to comedy is a bit of exaggeration.  And that one, from “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”, even manages its own little James Bond joke by showing the credits as Grampa and Jasper get up to leave the theater:

That one tag line, “You Have the Right to Remain Dead” is a far more inventive Bond satire than anything Zombie Simpsons did with Stradivarius Cain. 

Charlie Sweatpants: Ready to get started?

Mad Jon: Let’s.

  I actually remembered to set my DVR to record an extra minute at the beginning, so I got to see the couch gag for once.

Charlie Sweatpants: Pretty sure it was a repeat again, but I didn’t check.

Mad Jon: Short and sweet is what my notes tell me. I don’t remember it, so that makes it new to me.

Charlie Sweatpants: Huh, Wikipedia says it was new. Yeah, I don’t have much to complain about there.

Mad Jon: Go social encyclopedia.

Charlie Sweatpants: The problems started right afterward though. That Stradivarius Cain movie at the beginning was awful.

It was like watching a reboot of McBain, but with none of the humor and all of the pandering taken seriously.

Mad Jon: Goddamn it that couldn’t have been worse. All I could do to fight the pain was to visualize the McBain movie where he pops out of the ice sculpture.

Charlie Sweatpants: My thoughts exactly.

  The fact that the villain’s girlfriend did the cartoony "uh, of course" kind of thing also ruined it.

McBain was funny because it was exactly like a real crappy action movie, this was like an imitation of one of those awful parody movies.

Mad Jon: The best part of those movies are that they are timeless. This was a social media version of the Star Wars movie parody where they got locked up in procedural amendments.

Charlie Sweatpants: Good way to put it.

Mad Jon: It’s a sad day when so much of my attention is going to the opening movie which leads to Homer being a in-theater commenter, who, although beloved by his best friends for it, doesn’t do it again throughout the movie.

  But it does lead to him trying to be smooth for his wife and Tony Montana.

Charlie Sweatpants: That was like the movie scene from "Colonel Homer", minus everything that made it funny.

  The whole Lenny and Carl thing was just odd.

Mad Jon: Got to get them in there I guess.

Charlie Sweatpants: It was a recurring theme. When Marge comes to the plant to drop off that basket for Homer, who should be standing outside but Lenny.

Mad Jon: Yeah, not much to say here. But anywhere Homer needed someone to further his fight with Marge, there was Lenny and Carl.

Charlie Sweatpants: That happened a lot as well. Homer needs to practice being suave, here’s half a dozen women patiently waiting their turn for him to talk to them.

Mad Jon: Yeah, where the hell was that bar??

Charlie Sweatpants: It kind of reminded me of the place Homer was asked to leave without making a fuss, but I’d chalk it up more to Springfield’s increasing resemblance to the nicer parts of Los Angeles.

Mad Jon: Well alright then.

Charlie Sweatpants: The second restaurant was even weirder.

Mad Jon: Was that a restaurant? I thought it was more like a garden party or something. It reminded me of the squid port opening.

Charlie Sweatpants: Homer called it a restaurant, but it was odd.

Mad Jon: Ah.

Charlie Sweatpants: Did you notice that Not Bond was strapped into the kid seat?

Mad Jon: Yeah, I was waiting for that to, you know, be something. Other than awkward, of course.

Charlie Sweatpants: That’s what was so strange. Why did he look all nervous and scared?

Mad Jon: He did look very strange for an imaginary friend.

But whatever. I guess that’s the price for getting to watch people make out?

Charlie Sweatpants: That’s one of the things that didn’t make sense. He was into that a second ago. Of course, here I am trying to figure the motives of an imaginary character who was brought forth with one of the most trite cliches in television: the magic bonk on the head.

Mad Jon: An imaginary character who has apparently shared an imaginary woman with Snuffleupagus.

Charlie Sweatpants: It’s best not to think about it.

Mad Jon: But other than that, probably not much to figure out.

Charlie Sweatpants: No, and in case there was, they helpfully explained everything every six seconds.

  This is a partial list of what’s in my notes, but I typed as I watched so these might be a bit off:

  “Stop saying what you’d call things”

  “Sir, that was your partner, you betrayed him to the cannibals”

  “I have eight weeks paid vacation and my family doesn’t know” – This one was right after they showed us exactly that.

  “Because I was up late lamenting the choices I’ve made”

  “Oh great, another documentary making me look like a scuzzbag.” – bonus points on this one for making no sense by having Krusty walk into the movie.

“Now that’s it’s after-noon”/”Hear your pathetic rationalizing through the door”/”Pack of raccoons” – That whole scene with Moe was them explaining what either just happened or was about to happen.

  “I thought I was making small talk, but it turned out to be big talk”.

  “The three of us are going to the most romantic restaurant in town”

I could go on. There were so fucking many of these, but I think I’ve made my point. So many words, so very little actually said.

Mad Jon: Indeed. The "The three of us…." one was the worst.

Only because even by zombie standards, that should have prompted a reaction from Marge.

Charlie Sweatpants: I’m partial to Marge’s "Stop saying what you’d call things". She literally just could’ve said "Stop". Or they could’ve actually given her a joke or something.

Mad Jon: Well, in all fairness, they were all, just, terrible.

And on top of that, only one of those lines was from the ‘B’ plot.

We haven’t even stepped into the pile which was the almost a decade old lead in to the ‘B’ plot.

Charlie Sweatpants: By all means, let’s step.

  These new Italian loafers will make short work of it.

Mad Jon: I actually don’t have a lot of notes about it, because it wasn’t that in depth.

  Bart’s plan is to fatten up Nelson so he can’t beat him up, he accomplishes this, and then Nelson and Lisa get Krusty to make him a super bully, and then it is over.

Charlie Sweatpants: There wasn’t much there.

Mad Jon: That is literally all of my notes for the B plot.

Charlie Sweatpants: Well, it did contain what may have been the most outdated joke I can recall them making in a while, the whole Alicia Silverstone was fat in that unwatchable Batman 4 movie.

  That joke expired in about 1998.

Mad Jon: I was going to say, how old was the average viewer when that made sense? 2? maybe 3?

Whatever, I often feel like boring is the methadone that helps me through these things.

Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, but they made me think about Batman 4. That’s just wrong.

Mad Jon: Normal life, where I don’t have to watch Zombie Simpsons, of course being the heroin.

Charlie Sweatpants: Heh.

Mad Jon: Just got to take it one Sunday at a time…

Charlie Sweatpants: What was pissy about the B-plot though was the fact that Krusty was wherever he was needed. He was in the documentary, he was there when Lisa and Nelson showed up, and then his personal trainer was too.

The entire thing was filler, so they just rushed it along.

Mad Jon: Yeah, that was kind of lazy, but that’s what happens when you write yourself into a corner.

Charlie Sweatpants: Like they didn’t have enough to make it a real plot, but they had too much to make it a one or two scene joke, so we got that.

Mad Jon: Anyone who has paid attention to my chat text from these things will know that I completely understand.

Charlie Sweatpants: Fair enough.

Mad Jon: I don’t think I have thought about Morgan Spurlock since 2006, by the way… Who was sitting on that??

Charlie Sweatpants: Well, he did do that Simpsons special a couple of years ago.

  But Zombie Simpsons doesn’t generally like being with the times.

Mad Jon: Yeah, but I block those things out pretty quickly.

Charlie Sweatpants: Probably for the best.

  Anything else here?

Mad Jon: Not really, I am disappointed that there really wasn’t even 1 joke that I could consider noteworthy in a positive way.

But we’ve covered enough of the crap I guess.

Charlie Sweatpants: I chuckled at the Oscar documentary form having Holocaust and non-Holocaust as checkboxes, but that was it.

Mad Jon: Yeah, I can almost see that, but meh. Sorry to disappoint you.

Charlie Sweatpants: That’s okay, I’m long over disappointment.

Mad Jon: Good. Cause I’m not going to change for you.

Charlie Sweatpants: Works for me.

From Mad Jon via e-mail this morning:

On a side-ish note, I forgot to mention it last night, but did you notice the more-insane-than-normal sense of time that episode had?  Homer has eight weeks of paid leave, Marge finds out during week six, right?  At the same time Bart is trying to get Nelson to eat Krusty burger for a month, which actually lasts 2 weeks, and then he gets buff in what must have been three weeks, because at the very end Homer mentions he was supposed to be back at work last week.

I have been thinking about that all morning for some ungodly reason.  Work is bad enough, but my daydreaming is involving a zombiesode.  Oh well.