“Smithers, I seem to recall you had a penchant for bell bottomed trousers, back in ’79.” – C.M. Burns “Sir, that was my costume from the plant production of HMS Pinafore.” – Mr. Smithers “Oh, yes, of course. Your spirited hornpipe stole the show as I recall.” – C.M. Burns Another week, another forgettable episode from Zombie Simpsons. Homer and Bart get into a fight about broccoli, then end up on a father-son sailing ship. Along the way, Homer gets scurvy, is thrown overboard a couple of times, vomits, and gets attacked by an octopus. Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Marge…
Category: Behind Us Forever
Behind Us Forever: Clown in the Dumps
“My first day of college. I wish my father was alive to see this.” – Homer Simpson “Hey!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “How long have you been back there?” – Homer Simpson “Three days.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson (Sorry for not getting this up yesterday. The day got away from me.) Season 26 picked up right where season 25 left off: a time eating guest couch gag, many needlessly self voiced celebrities, characters explaining how they feel and what they’re doing, and plenty of other boring nonsense. The A-plot was about Krusty being sad and involved the much hyped character…
Behind Us Forever: The Yellow Badge of Cowardge
“Gratzi, gratzi, you have brought great joy to this old Italian stereotype.” – Don Vittorio DiMaggio “No, no, Don Vittorio, you’re not-” – Legs “Yes, I am. I know it, I am.” – Don Vittorio DiMaggio If nothing else, “The Yellow Badge of Cowardge” capped off Season 25 with the same brand of forgettable and lackluster nonsense that we’ve come to expect. (Points for consistency, if literally nothing else.) Jokes and childishly simple plot points are explained ad nauseam while the overall story staggers around in a world of dull nonsense. So, for example, near the middle of the episode Homer and…
Behind Us Forever: Pay Pal
“And this is Lord Thistlewick Flanders.” – Ned Flanders “Charmed . . . Uh, googily doogily.” – Lord Thistlewick Flanders Every once and a while we get episodes like “Pay Pal” that seem to be made up of B-plots that got discarded from other episodes and were found lying on the writers’ room floor. The first thing that happens is that there’s an Evergreen Terrace block party, then John Oliver shows up as a new British neighbor. Then he gets into a fight with Homer and vanishes completely from the episode. With the “British neighbor” story concluded, there’s a new…
Behind Us Forever: Brick Like Me
“George Carlin on three.” – Miss Pennycandy “Yeah? Lawsuit? Oh, come on! My seven words you can’t say on TV bit was entirely different from your seven words you can’t say on TV bit. So I’m a thief, am I? Well, excuse me! . . . Give him ten grand.” – Krusty the Klown “Steve Martin on four.” – Miss Pennycandy “Ten grand.” – Krusty the Klown Let’s get this out of the way first: this is the best they can do and they know it. If the PR machine is to be believed, this episode took two years to make…
Behind Us Forever: What to Expect When Bart’s Expecting
“Gotcha! It’s April Fool’s for two more minutes.” – Homer Simpson “Dad, it’s May 16th.” – Bart Simpson “You were in that coma for seven weeks.” – Lisa Simpson This week’s pile of horseshit starts with Bart’s chalkboard saying “You Can’t Play April Fool’s Jokes on April 27th”, which is their way of telling the audience that even they recognized this one as a wretched and unwatchable entry. Homer and Bart serenade a horse in a cheap, wannabe Les Miserables parody, but that’s after Bart gets a bunch of people pregnant with voodoo, which was itself after they fell back on referencing…
Behind Us Forever: Days of Future Future
“Bart, you cast the wrong spell! Zombies!” – Lisa Simpson So, was this episode the Futurama crossover or not? I didn’t see Fry or Leela, but there was a beer swilling robot and lots of inter-species relationships, so I’m not entirely sure. Also, part of it was a coma fantasy or a dream sequence, but I don’t have access to an original script so I don’t know if those pages were on pink paper or goldenrod. For those of you sage enough not to have watched it, we begin in the present when Homer dies. Frink, and remember, this is supposed…
Behind Us Forever: Luca$
“Where is Homer, anyway?” – Selma Bouvier “It’s so typical of the big doofus to spoil it all.” – Patty Bouvier “What, Aunt Patty?” – Lisa Simpson “Oh, nothing, dear, I’m just trashing your father.” – Patty Bouvier “Well, I wish you wouldn’t. Because, aside from the fact that he has the same frailties as all human beings, he’s the only father I have. Therefore he is my model of manhood, and my estimation of him will govern the prospects of my adult relationships. So I hope you bear in mind that any knock at him is a knock at…
Behind Us Forever: You Don’t Have to Live Like a Referee
“I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change, and then quickly change back.” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons has enough systemic and repetitive problems that I would never try to identify one that really breaks it, but the way that none of the characters ever act like themselves is especially annoying. Gaping plot holes, weak and joke free dialogue, lazy product parodies, characters appearing out of nowhere, these are all problems. But when they take characters we all know and love and have them act like versions of themselves that have suffered personality altering brain injuries it really…
Behind Us Forever: The War of Art
“Oh, Kenny, look at the interplay of light and shadow. It’s so luminous and vibrant!” – Lisa Simpson “Thanks, Lisa, I painted that one. The real one’s in my garage.” – Kenny the Museum Guard If there is one topic on which Zombie Simpsons has a thorough and well practiced knowledge, it is imitating great art. That didn’t help them keep “The War of Art” from being a meandering, exposition filled wasteland, of course, but it does add a nice level of unintentional meta-irony that will help you through what passes for the third act. By the time Max von…
Behind Us Forever: The Winter of His Content
“Well, let me tell you something, boy, if you don’t stand up for yourself, bullies are gonna be picking on you for the rest of your life.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Simpson! Give me your newspaper!” – Jasper “Why should I?” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “I wanna do the crossword puzzle.” – Jasper “No, I want to do the crossword puzzle.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “I said, give me that puzzle!” – Jasper “No.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Gimme!” – Jasper “No.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Gimme!” – Jasper “No . . . Well, I guess I can’t help you.…
Behind Us Forever: Diggs & The Man Who Grew Too Much
“Grasping the child firmly in his talons, Socrates here will fly him to safety. Just watch . . . I don’t think he’s coming back.” – Falconry Guy First we got a nice long break from Zombie Simpsons, and then they made their triumphant return by dropping two great big steaming piles back-to-back. The first one, “Diggs”, is among the more tone deaf episodes I can recall in a while. It’s about a mentally ill kid who likes falcons and then gets hauled off to a loony bin for the rest of his life. They play it for sad, but…
Behind Us Forever: Specs and the City
“This is my pride and joy: I’ve had hidden cameras planted in every home in Springfield. I got the idea from that movie ‘Sliver’, what a delightful romp.” – C.M. Burns If there’s one thing Zombie Simpsons has perfected, it’s taking familiar elements of The Simpsons, blasting away everything that made them wonderful, and then propping up the barely recognizable remains as though they weren’t decrepit garbage. In its own ass backwards way, “Specs and the City” was a tour-de-force of that. Homer actually spent time at the nuclear plant and stopped for a beer at Moe’s when he was done.…
Behind Us Forever: Married To The Blob
"Tell me, how do you feel about forty-five year old virgins who still live with their parents?" – Comic Book Guy "Comb the SweetTarts out of your beard and you’re on." – Comic Babe "Don’t try to change me, baby." – Comic Book Guy [Note: Sorry for the extremely late posting on this one. That kind of week. Compare & Contrast should be along tomorrow.] Over the last ten years or so, Hollywood has become extremely adept at giving "geeks" (for lack of a better term) what they want. The most visible expression of this is the way that comic…
Behind Us Forever: Steal This Episode
“Come on, Milhouse, you have to do this. If not for yourself, then for the movie going public, and for the foreign markets that more important than ever nowadays, and finally, for me, the Mickster.” – Mickey Rooney“No.” – Milhouse van Houten“Alright, I tried.” – Mickey Rooney I’m on record as saying that the “travel” episodes tend to be the least unwatchable. They still can’t tell a story for shit, the dialogue remains hamfisted and expository, and nothing makes sense even within individual scenes, but giving them a fresh topic usually does result in a couple of decent laughs. “Steal…
Behind Us Forever: White Christmas Blues
“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…
Behind Us Forever: The Kid Is All Right
“Worked for the Carter Administration?” – Marge Simpson “Well, you voted for him, twice.” – Lisa Simpson “Lisa, shh, someone might be listening.” – Marge Simpson It’s never been all that hard to poke fun at Republicans and Democrats, but doing so would require Zombie Simpsons to make some jokes instead of spending all their time expositing an inane and nonsensical story. And when I say inane, I mean in-fucking-ane. Lisa meets the new kid in her class outside of class, for some reason, they do a project on FDR together without, it seems, ever talking to one another about…
Behind Us Forever: Labor Pains
“Step aside, I’ll deliver this baby.” – Homer Simpson “Uh, why don’t you let me handle it, Homer?” – Dr. Hibbert “Oh, college boy, eh?” – Homer Simpson “Homer, for God sakes, let him deliver the baby!” – Marge Simpson In its never ending desperation to come up with something – anything – that hasn’t specifically been done before, Zombie Simpsons will try everything from relatively mundane stories to outlandish fantasies. This episode had two of the former. In the A-plot, Homer helps deliver a baby after getting stuck in an elevator. In the B-plot, Lisa tries to help professional…
Behind Us Forever: YOLO (<- Yes, They Actually Called It That.)
“There is just one dance that will beat them, the Tango de la Muerte.” – Eduardo “Only one man was crazy enough to dance that dance, and he is dead!” – Lisabella “My twin brother, Freduardo! But where he died, I shall live . . . in his apartment.” – Eduardo Woof, this episode is awful. The A-plot consists of little more than a series of montages with “Eduardo”, Homer’s flat, characterless Spanish guardian angel. The B-plot involves Lisa creating an honor code which everyone except Bart follows for some reason, then she tears out some of her hair for…
Behind Us Forever: Four Regrettings And A Funeral
“I regret nothing!” – Doomed Guy in Movie Ticket Line If any of us had been wondering what it would be like if Zombie Simpsons took the unrelated tales from one of their four-part storytelling episodes, jammed them together with a bunch of expository and often unrelated flashbacks, and dropped in a self voiced celebrity, we need wonder no more. Proving that Season 25 can employ all the same flat out lazy shortcuts as Seasons 24, 23 and so on, we had characters telling us exactly how they feel, people wandering in and out of scenes seemingly at random, and…