“Well, Bart, uh, did you make sure to return all the guns?” – Homer Simpson “Sir, yes, sir! Luckily I am now trained in six additional forms of unarmed combat, sir!” – Bart Simpson “Well, he’s got more confidence.” – Marge Simpson “Uh, yeah, I’ve always said the boy could use more confidence.” – Homer Simpson Paths of Glory is a terribly underrated Kubrick movie staring Kirk Douglas as a French colonel in World War I. This episode, which shares its title for some unaccountable reason, should in no way be held against that fine film. In one of the…
Category: Behind Us Forever
Behind Us Forever: Lisa With an S
“Dad, why are you singing?” – Lisa Simpson “Tell a lie! Tell a lie!” – Homer’s Brain “Because I have a small roll in a Broadway musical. It’s not much, but it’s a start.” – Homer Simpson “Bravo.” – Homer’s Brain I gave up on this episode halfway through (read more and you’ll see why). The basic idea is that Lisa wants to go to band camp, but Homer loses money in a poker game to Moe’s elderly, ex-Broadway star girlfriend. (I am not making that up.) Said ex-Broadway star comes over to the house and then takes Lisa on…
Behind Us Forever: Treehouse of Horror XXVI
“At last, I’m going to do what Bob never could: kill Bart Simpson!” – Cecil Terwilliger “By throwing me off a dam? Isn’t that a little crude for a genius like you?” – Bart Simpson “Ooh, I suppose it is. Enh. If anyone asks, I’ll lie.” – Cecil Terwilliger The annual Halloween episode has come and gone, and this year’s was just as bland and forgettable as last year’s, and the year before that, etcetera. Perhaps next year’s will break the cycle of boredom, but I guess we’ll have to wait to find out. – Before we get started, let’s…
Behind Us Forever: Bull-E
“I guess I’ve always used violence as a way of getting attention.” – Jimbo Jones “Yes, yes! Me too!” – Nelson Muntz Bart gets bullied, so Marge gets the town council to pass an anti-bullying law, which allows Wiggum to lock up a bunch of random people, which puts Homer into group therapy for bullying Flanders, which causes Homer to become a hero, which causes Flanders to resent him and make him beg for forgiveness. That terrible sentence took you much less time to read than this episode would to watch. – Weird couch gag with all the soccer balls,…
Behind Us Forever: Let’s Go Fly a Coot
“Hey, look, someone’s attractive cousin!” – Bart Simpson This week on Zombie Simpsons, a bunch of old Air Force pilots show up to threaten Homer into spending time with his dad, or something. Meanwhile, Milhouse’s hot cousin (voiced by Carice van Houten, a/k/a She Who Queefs Shadows on Game of Thrones) likes to use e-cigarettes. Nothing much happens in either. – Short couch gag and shortened opening, don’t see that too often. – We open at Milhouse’s super elaborate birthday party. Homer picks up the take home bag and helpfully tells us what each of the contents are as he picks…
Behind Us Forever: The Kids Are All Fight
“It all began about two years ago before Maggie was even born. Bart, you were Lisa’s age, and Lisa, you were the age Bart was several years ago.” – Homer Simpson As it has doddered along these last few years, Zombie Simpsons has started to turn to flash forward episodes a bit more often where Bart and Lisa are adults with kids of their own. For “The Kids Are All Fight”, they went the other way, going backwards to some indeterminate time a few years ago when Bart was four and Lisa was two. The story, which was even more…
Behind Us Forever: Peeping Mom
This single shot from “Sideshow Bob Roberts” contains a more coherent story than the entirety of “Peeping Mom”. After four weeks off, Zombie Simpsons is back. Not much changed. This week, Chief Wiggum accuses Bart of going on a bulldozer rampage, he then hands Bart to Marge so that the two of them can have the same idiotic conversation several times in a row. Because that one note attempt at emotion couldn’t possibly fill twenty whole minutes of screen time, the Flanderses get a new dog who likes Homer better than Ned. – Decent couch gag. – We’re not off to…
Behind Us Forever: Waiting for Duffman
“Hey, it’s Duffman, a guy in a costume who creates awareness of Duff!” – Lenny I was just getting ready to watch last week’s Zombie Simpsons when news of Sam Simon’s death broke. I guess Wiggum got a jetpack or something. This week, however, there was nothing to do but plow through it, as Homer got yet another job, this time as Duffman, and quit drinking at the same time. – Couch gag wasn’t too bad, right up until Homer’s severed head. Which was weird. – This bicycle parade just keeps going. And it’s filled with that really formulaic “setup-beat-punchline”…
Behind Us Forever: The Princess Guide
“I’m sorry, Homer. It’s just, it’s been four years since my last date with a whatchacallit . . . a woman.” – Moe Another week, another Zombie Simpsons episode. This one starts with “Take Your Daughter to Work Day”, which means Lisa gets to go to the power plant again. That doesn’t last long, however, as Burns suddenly needs uranium and begins negotiating with a Nigerian king (yes, you read that correctly). In the meantime, the king’s daughter is going to be looked after by Homer. The daughter wants to go out and see the town, but ends up inexplicably hanging…
Behind Us Forever: My Fare Lady
“Chauffeur, seamstress, curator of large mammals?” – Marge Simpson “Marge, have you seen my lunch box?” – Homer Simpson “Oh, I see.” – Marge Simpson In this episode, Moe leaves Homer in charge of the bar. Meanwhile, Marge gets a job as a Not Lyft driver. Then Moe, his bar wrecked, gets a job at the nuclear plant. Then Homer gets a different job at the nuclear plant. Then it ends. On the plus side, they used that awesome pixel opening that hit the internet a couple of weeks back. Pretty much all downhill from there, though. – Really was…
Behind Us Forever: Walking Big & Tall
“Well, this man doesn’t crawl, he stands tall! That rhymes, Marge, and you know it rhymes. Admit it!” – Homer Simpson Another week, another structurally messy, weirdly lifeless, exposition heavy, joke lite episode of Zombie Simpsons. They open with a flashback to “30 years ago” when Hans Moleman was mayor and all the current adults were kids. They sing a crappy song, have a montage, sing it some more, then Bart and Lisa are commissioned to write a new song. After all that, Marge sends Homer to a support group for people to lose weight, but he ends up at…
Behind Us Forever: The Musk Who Fell to Earth
“Eww, this place has got old man stink!” – Hitman “Oh.” – C.M. Burns “Don’t listen to him, sir. You’ve got an enchanting musk.” – Mr. Smithers I never bothered to watch the Lady Gaga episode a second time, so this comparison may be a little looser than I think it is, but the Elon Musk episode sure felt a lot like it. A mega famous person arrives out of nowhere in Springfield (Gaga in a giant train, Musk in a spaceship that lands in the Simpsons backyard), crazy shit happens for a little while, then the mega famous person…
Behind Us Forever: Bart’s New Friend
“Then me and my friend were about to press it, but the man said not to press it, but we pressed it anyway! And we ran and we hid in a giant tire, oh yeah, and my other friend was already there!” – Homer Simpson In yet another desperate bid for attention, Zombie Simpsons has once again hitched its cart to a more currently successful person. In this case, it’s Judd Apatow (who wrote a couple of good episodes of The Critic back in the day), who dusted off an old spec script he wrote twenty odd years ago. The premise…
Behind Us Forever: The Man Who Came to Be Dinner
“Are you going to need us tonight?” – Kang “I had ballet tickets! Not that they’ll do much good now.” – Kodos It’s now clear that Al Jean and David Mirkin (who co-wrote), and David Silverman (who directed), would much rather be working on Futurama than Zombie Simpsons, and I don’t blame them. Like various Star Treks, that show gave its writers and directors a functionally unlimited amount of creative leeway. Need to make fun of something? Make up a new planet or a new species or a new anything and there you go. Zombie Simpsons, on the other hand,…
Behind Us Forever: I Won’t Be Home For Christmas
“Hey, I thought Krusty was Jewish.” – Lisa Simpson “Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.” – Bart Simpson According to IMDb, this is the first whole episode Al Jean’s written in a long time. Sadly, it didn’t seem to matter. Homer goes on one zany little escapade after another, there’s plenty of expository nonsense, several musical montages that seem designed to do nothing more than eat clock (efforts at which fell so short that they added a preview of the next episode to help fill all twenty of their contractually obligated…
Behind Us Forever: Blazed and Confused
“Camp is gonna be great! Seven days without parents, homework or ear medicine!” – Milhouse van Houten The best thing to say about this episode is that at least the designers and animators had some fun (including David Silverman, who even got a line!). Other than that, this one was a cheerless, contradictory mess. There’s a new teacher, who’s some kind of psychotic, rule crazy nutjob, but who nevertheless is a regular at “Blazing Guy”, a Burning Man parody so uncreative that they actually tried to make fun of themselves for it. Nothing we see of this guy would indicate…
Behind Us Forever: Simpsorama
“Some Bart Simpson dolls!” – Fry “Eat my shorts.” – Bart Simpson Doll “Okay. Mmm, shorts.” – Bender Well, the Futurama crossover finally happened. It had a few good jokes here and there, which is above average for Zombie Simpsons, but mostly it was a mess and suffered from the same kinds of crossover problems we all so recently suffered through with Family Guy: cramming in as many characters from Futurama as possible, whether or not putting them there is funny or necessary. It’s a thing that happened, a little footnote to both shows that will never be confused with the cream…
Behind Us Forever: Opposites A-frack
“Leave it to good old Mary Bailey to finally step in and do something about that hideous genetic mutation.” – Marge Simpson This week on Zombie Simpsons, Burns does something we saw him do much funnier twenty years ago, but he also falls in love and becomes a softy for a while. In between, Patty and Selma live with the Simpsons for a while, Marge, Lisa and Smithers vanish for most of the episode, Homer gets another new job, and there’s a big explosion. – No couch gag this week, so what they left in must be pure gold! –…
Behind Us Forever: Treehouse of Horror XXV
“Stupid party, wish we was trick or treatin’.” – Bart Simpson The annual Halloween episode tends to be pretty bland in the hands of Zombie Simpsons, and this year was no different. The first story was about Bart going to school in Hell, where he does better than he used to do at Springfield Elementary. The second is a bunch of meandering references to Stanley Kubrick movies that ends with Kubrick himself staring right at the camera for some reason. The third one involved the old Tracey Ullman versions of the characters being ghosts. – Give them this, if they’re…
Behind Us Forever: Super Franchise Me
“Don’t make me tap the sign.” – Bus Driver There are episodes of Zombie Simpsons that border on manic, where they just throw crazy shit at the screen and hope that some of the incoherent jumble produces a chuckle or two. But there are also episodes like “Super Franchise Me”, that feel like they were produced by people in the depths of an Eeyore level depression. This is Zombie Simpsons going through the motions: slowly, reluctantly, joylessly. The story, Marge opens a sandwich franchise, is paper napkin thin, and since there’s no B-plot, they had to tack on a slow…