“I know this has been a stressful holiday, but, in a way, having nothing reminds us how lucky we really are.” – Marge Simpson
“What?” – Lisa Simpson
“We still have each other. And isn’t that the best gift of all?” – Marge Simpson
“But we would’ve had each other anyway.” – Lisa Simpson
“Yeah, plus lots of other stuff.” – Bart Simpson
I’m on record as saying that the sign gags are one of the few things Zombie Simpsons can still manage to do well. But if there’s one thing Zombie Simpsons knows how to do, it’s take something decent and destroy it completely through repetition and overuse, and thus “White Christmas Blues” was born. That video game scene where they spent half a minute throwing jokey titles at the screen was a masterpiece of taking something that kinda works and totally obliterating it. By the third or fourth batch, it became apparent that, yup, they were going to empty that whole shelf, and who cares if it amounts to pausing the episode for thirty seconds to give us all a reading test?
What passed for the story wasn’t any better. Sure, there might be something decent with “other family spends Christmas with the Simpsons”, but instead of that they crammed in an excess of character-less characters and had Marge patiently explain everything that was happening while it was happening. Also, there were weird, one-off scenes with Milhouse and Lovejoy and Lisa, who apparently forgot who her brother was. I’ve said this before, but sketch comedy shows often have better inter-scene continuity than Zombie Simpsons.
– Once again, the opening is rather good. Sure it’s yet another transparent attempt to kill clock (checking in at 90 seconds will do that), but it’s cute in several places and even has a couple of decent sign gags.
– The Itchy & Scratchy wasn’t bad, right up until Krusty started telling us what’s going on.
– It’s the only town with snow . . . which they’ve now told us three times.
– Marge’s listing of the out of state license plates wasn’t terrible, except for the fact that she was listing them instead of the show, you know, showing them to us.
– Okay, so they get paid three hundred bucks a night to let these people in their house because they can’t afford Christmas. That’s fine. Why, one fucking scene later, does Marge have to say this, “This is a great thing. We’re helping people celebrate Christmas and we’ll be able to afford Christmas.” Do we get to see them spend the money? Or see how having that extra cash lets them celebrate Christmas? Nope. We just get told.
– The hotel Jesus montage was a thing.
– Some of the Christmas movie titles were good, but twenty+ was Hedonism-bot excessive.
– Oh, man, this Lovejoy sermon scene is just awful. Remember when he asked people not to shout things out in the church? Long time ago, that.
– And the bed and breakfast thing has gotten quickly out of hand, with apparently multiple families having shown up for no discernible reason.
– What was with this? “Nothing is easy to wrap! I have trouble with scissors!” Does Yeardley Smith wince inside when they have Lisa say things like that?
– And then Flanders is there to explain the true meaning of Christmas before wandering off.
– The carols going on after the credits was repetitive and pointless.
– And there’s the license plates, because decent jokes must be overused. It’s the law.
Anyway, the ratings are in and they don’t suck for once because of a late football game that went down to the wire (Dear Dallas Cowboys, Thanks for all the laughs. Sincerely, Everyone Else). The preliminary numbers indicate that 8.38 million people wished they were watching one of the show’s other Christmas episodes last night. That’s by far the highest of the season, and will probably remain so even after that number is inevitably revised down to reflect all the people who turned their sets off right after Dallas finished imploding.
Dead Homer Society 
14 responses to “Behind Us Forever: White Christmas Blues”
Yeah, Lisa got a complete brain drain in this one. Surely Lisa had to economize her Christmas gifts in the past cuz she’s, you know, in grade school and unemployed. She should know Homer and Bart’s taste in gifts are by now. Homer was actually optimistic for a while up until he realized Lisa didn’t buy more than one type of vegetable seed, and even then there was no mention that he couldn’t use them until Spring.
Compare it to when Bart with his “Santos L. Holper” credit card was able to get gifts everyone in the family enjoyed. Strangely he also outdoes Lisa by getting something she would actually like (a full Angelica Button costume) instead of getting her a framed picture of his butt or something. In retrospect, the latter isn’t far from what she deserved.
“I have trouble with scissors”? Who is she, Ralph? And that whole “Gift of Magi” bit not only was a very poor reference to the short story, it naturally spelled out the reference to the audience. Futurama did it much better and effectively 13 years ago. More damning is that Lisa apparently set up that labored reference herself.
On a side note, this episode must have the most attempted and overused amount freeze-frame sign gags in Simpsons history. That (endless) snowman gag and the license plate scenes are completely transparent time filler. Why have the lengthy scene with Marge, if they were just going to do the same scene to better effect during the credits?
Frosty the Hitman was clever at first…until he got to the shelves.
It went on for 30 seconds?! It felt much longer to me.
Did you see the sloppy animation continuity? http://imgur.com/s9TvuY5 (Moe is in the crowd watching himself speak.)
yikes!
Throwing a look at the comments in the previous posts would be nice, for example.
Stan, from wishing death upon the writers, to insulting commenters, there comes a point where you should learn to cool it.
I concur; cartoon purity/originality/etc. may be important to you as a passion/interest, but it’s not ‘serious business’ (to use one of those ‘hip youngster phrases’ you’re so contemptuous of, & I’m pretty out of the loop with much of modern pop culture myself).
See, this is exactly why I don’t come and write here as often as I used to. These folks (who are practically everywhere nowadays), take common knowledge jokes for racial/ethnic jabs, phrases that don’t start or end for “impolite”, say that I insult them for some reason and so on. Well, you know what? Fuck you. No, that’s right, I’m sick of this shit. If you have friends, family, boyfriends/girlfriends and you’ve never been through as much trouble in communicating with other human beings as I have, then just carry on. Your life is happy and that’s just sweet. So unless I get drunk and vote all over this website (which would pretty much be the end of me here), I prefer to keep it personal and leave. Don’t see you guys having a prob with it.
P.S. this comment is addressed to Junetemperature as well.
No, I understand frustration with ‘political correctness’ and whatnot perfectly. I think he was just being ‘funny’, or at least attempting it. As far as ‘trouble communicating with people’ goes, you’re not the only one; for me, it depends upon the person(s) (as well as their mood) &/or circumstances involved. Never came here for a fight.
Telling me too “cool it” is parsecs away from “funny” to my knowledge, unless I’m face to face with a chillax person telling me to “play it smooth, duuuuuude”. If such is the case, then this guy (girl?) is in a wrong karma compared to mine, because I can perfectly handle arguments that have a point instead of some shallow mood swing moderation suggestions.
Please kill yourself.
ROFL. OF course Mr. Ferrel, whatever you say sir! I’ll get to that right away!
Sometimes I watch/hear about ZS episodes and think “How would ‘The Simpsons’ have done this?”. The Simpson family running a bed and breakfast, that could’ve been funny. Like, the families that came would’ve all had some crazy quirks. The Simpson family would’ve spent the money on weird, funny gifts. And jokes wouldn’t be beaten into the ground.
I really hated this episode–I was the anonymous guy in the comments of the previous post on it–but I thought of how the plot could have been made coherent.
First gift-giving scene:
Lisa: Bart, I bought you a year’s worth of front-row tickets to Krusty’s show.
Bart: You know I lost interest in that show after Krusty censored himself! His show is nothing but shakycams and G.I. Joe cartoons now! This was a present for yourself! I give you a nice Angelica Button jacket, and you treat me like the winner of a new American car!
Ending:
Bart: I realized that you probably gave such a bad present because I gave you such horrible gifts I remember the stinkbugs in the shape of a venomous snake, the firecrackers that squirted bleach on you and the tapes of Homer’s April’s Fools pranks on Flanders, labelled “Nova.” I sold my battery charger to buy you a patch for that jacket.
Lisa: I sold my jacket to buy you this TerminalGold, which only has a few hours of battery life, no charger and very expensive batteries. Please use the little time you have to read The Gift of the Magi, which I have loaded on it and I hope will show you the irony.