“Hey, there’s something wrong with this guy, he’s not falling down!” – Kearney Sr. “What to Expect When Bart’s Expecting” was such a shambles of a story that trying to compare the whole thing to another episode would be futile. Finding just a few coherent seconds is hard enough. But there was one moment that lines up perfectly: Moe pulling his shotgun on people threatening Homer. Moe did almost the exact same thing in “The Homer They Fall”, only there it was quicker, funnier and made more sense for all involved. To start, compare why Homer is there in each…
Category: Compare & Contrast
Compare & Contrast: Homer the Incorruptible
"We don’t have to be adversaries, Homer. We both want a fair union contract." – C.M. Burns "Why is Mr. Burns being so nice to me?" – Homer’s Brain "And if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours." – C.M. Burns "Wait a minute, is he coming on to me?" – Homer’s Brain "I mean, if I should slip something into your pocket, what’s the harm?" – C.M. Burns "My God, he is coming on to me." – Homer’s Brain "After all, negotiations make strange bedfellows." – C.M. Burns For a simple and common act, bribery requires a surprising amount…
Compare & Contrast: Milhouse’s Parents Split Up
“You know who the real victim is in all of this? Milhouse.” – Marge Simpson Zombie Simpsons excels at telling the audience what is happening rather than showing them, which is the script writing equivalent of being a bricklayer who doesn’t use mortar. Show don’t tell is so fundamental to the job that you have to wonder how anyone could forget it, and the proof is in the piles of rubble that they try to pass off as finished work. Case in point from this week’s dreary “The War of Art” was Milhouse’s reaction to his parents breaking up. Thanks…
Compare & Contrast: Marge Becomes Less Attracted to Homer
“Mr. Burns, can you make me thin again?” – Homer Simpson “I guarantee it. . . . One . . . one! . . . one! . . . Bah, I’ll just pay for the blasted liposuction!” – C.M. Burns “Woo-hoo!” – Homer Simpson The Simpsons always had an acknowledged and popular soft touch with big emotions. For all the craziness going on in the rest of the episode, they could deftly deliver both believably sweet moments and ones that packed real punch. The same show that has Marge finally snap at Bart’s selfishness and yell that he ruined Thanksgiving…
Compare & Contrast: Sideshow Bob On Top of a Dam
“This looks like the work of crazy old Sideshow Bob.” – Chief Wiggum “No, chief, Bob’s innocent! It’s the truth.” – Lisa Simpson “The truth, huh? That sounds like the testimony of crazy old Lisa Simpson.” – Chief Wiggum Sometimes Zombie Simpsons makes it hard to tell the difference between fan service and one of its regularly craptacular plot zigzags. Was the fact that Sideshow Bob chased Bart and Lisa to the top of a dam at the end of “The Man Who Grew Too Much” supposed to be a shout out to “Brother From the Same Planet”? Or was…
Compare & Contrast: Involuntary Commitment
"Sir! I’m so sorry my grocer committed you. We’ll never shop there again." – Mr. Smithers Like the practice of medicine in general, the treatment of mental illness has a longstanding history of cruelty, incompetence and abuse. People have undergone everything from lifetime confinement and mind changing drug regimes to electric shocks and lobotomies because of pseudo-scientific theories that often had (and have) more to do with the ignorance and prevailing prejudices of the people administering the "treatments" than they do with making the patients better. On top of that is the frightful prospect of a mentally healthy person becoming…
Compare & Contrast: Marge in Therapy
“Eww, you like the Monkees? You know they don’t write their own songs.” – Girl on Bus “They do so!” – Marge Bouvier “They don’t even play their own instruments.” – Girl on Bus “No! No!” – Marge Bouvier “That’s not even Michael Nesmith‘s real hat.” – Girl on Bus “Ahhhhhhh!” – Marge Bouvier “Kids can be so cruel.” – Dr. Zweig “But it’s true, they didn’t write their own songs or play their own instruments.” – Marge Simpson “The Monkees weren’t about music, Marge, they were about rebellion! About political and social upheaval!” – Dr. Zweig When The Simpsons…
Compare & Contrast: Overprotective Fathers
“Samantha!” – Mr. Stanky “Dad!” – Samantha Stanky “Noooooo!” – Mr. Stanky As far as nothingburger girlfriend characters go, Kumiko is so empty that she makes the relatively one-dimensional Rene from Season 9 look like Katniss Everdeen. Rene at least talked to Moe before dating him out of pity. Kumiko apparently fell in love with Comic Book Guy without even so much as meeting him. But even that vacuous characterization is rich and deep compared to Kumiko’s father, who shows up out of the blue and instantly becomes the focus of the episode despite failing, after his very first scene,…
Compare & Contrast: Federal Hardasses
“With rum running hoodlums in the catbird seat, Springfield sent for the one man who could clean up the town and shoot the gangsters: Rex Banner.” – Narrator Who Is Not Walter Winchell These days there are more teevee cop stereotypes than you can shake a nightstick at. There are the gruff loners who play by their own rules, but they get results, damn it. There are the emotionally haunted forensics experts. There are the (always model pretty) lady detectives who are just as tough as the boys. In the subset of federal teevee cops, we’ve got everything from savvy…
Compare & Contrast: Krusty Franchises His Name
"Alright, so there can only be one Krusty in each territory, so I hope this works out. Tell me where you’re from." – Krusty the Klown "Georgia." – Southern Hick "Texas." – Exaggerated Texan #1 "Uh . . . Brooklyn." – Exaggerated Texan #2 "Russia." – Fur Hatted Russian "New Hampshire." – Stuffy Yankee "Homer!" – Homer Simpson Krusty the Klown is a great symbol of so much that is wrong with the entertainment industry. He long ago shed any last vestige of dignity, then stopped caring about the quality of his show or his merchandise shortly thereafter. He doesn’t…
Compare & Contrast: Strikes and Strikebreakers
“Goodbye, Springfield, from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!” – C.M. Burns The line everyone knows from 1987’s Wall Street is, “Greed is good”. Of course, Michael Douglas doesn’t quite say that; his actual line is “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. Either way it’s not the best line in the movie. That honor goes to Martin Sheen, playing the skeptical head of an airline mechanics union. Sitting in Gordon Gekko’s excessively 1980s penthouse as the iconic bankster of the time licks his chops over wage cuts now for theoretical profit sharing tomorrow, Sheen sagely notes: “The…
Compare & Contrast: James Bond Songs
“Ingenious, isn’t it, Mr. Bont?” – Hank Scorpio “Scorpio, you’re totally mad.” – Bont “I wouldn’t point fingers, you jerk.” – Hank Scorpio “So, do you expect me to talk?” – Bont “I don’t expect anything from you except to die and be a very cheap funeral.” – Hank Scorpio When The Simpsons was still itself it often featured song parodies and takeoffs that were toe-tapping fun. But those songs were never simply direct ports of existing songs with just a word or two changed. When Shary Bobbins sings "A Boozehound Named Barney", it’s recognizable as "Feed the Birds", but…
Compare & Contrast: Burns’ Old Romances
“Aw, Pop, don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be here. But how’s a guy like you wind up with a son like me?” – Larry [Programming Note: Sorry for the late posting on this. Reading Digest should be along at roughly the usual time later today.] The most obvious repeat in “Four Regrettings and a Funeral” was the use of “Memories” for Homer’s flashback. Par for the course for Zombie Simpsons, it was a very weak imitation. In “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”, we see Homer reminiscing about all the things he did with his stomach over the years,…
Compare & Contrast: Suspense Show Takeoffs
“For the love of God, help me! I’ve been here for four days and a turtle’s got a hold of my teeth. There he is! Come back here, you. Slow down! I’ll get yeh!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “This is the worst assignment we’ve ever had.” – Agent Scully “Worse than the time we were attacked by the flesh eating virus?” – Agent Mulder “Ow! He bit me with my own teeth!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “No, this is much more irritating.” – Agent Scully Whether it’s shadowy terrorist networks and shady politicians, a government conspiracy to collude with aliens,…
Compare & Contrast: Bart and Grampa Team Up (Plus Shameless Self Promotion)
“Hey, Grampa, do you think I could’ve been a Flying Hellfish?” – Bart Simpson “You’re a gutsy daredevil with a give ’em hell attitude and a fourth grade education, you coulda made sergeant.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson Since Zombie Simpsons has no choice but to copy the format and characters of The Simpsons, it’s basically inevitable that they have to repeat the same ideas and even story structures. Sometimes they’re at least a little clever about it, other times, as in “Gorgeous Grampa”, they basically just put an old episode on the copy machine and hope that the inevitable degradation…
Compare & Contrast: Parental Substitutes
“Who wants to be the first to enter God’s good graces?” – Ned Flanders Zombie Simpsons has a well established track record for wild plot twists, nonsensical stories, and characters behaving so strangely that one wonders whether or not they’re still supposed to be human. “The Changing of the Guardian” valiantly upheld that reputation, particularly in the way it took its main conflict, scrambled it beyond even a semblance of coherence, and then awkwardly jammed it into just the last two minutes of the episode. Consider, for a second, the enormous inhumanity this episode expects you, the audience member, to…
Compare & Contrast: Twist Nuclear Endings
“Do your worst, you filthy, pretentious savages!” – Mayor Quimby For evidence that Zombie Simpsons is utterly bereft of ideas that can even be called creative, much less original, one need look no further than the fact that for the second time in a year they made an episode where the family departs Springfield to go live in the wilderness with survivalist nutbars. But that isn’t the most damning thing about “Homer Goes to Prep School”, because the closest thing to this episode isn’t even another episode, it’s a post-apocalyptic Halloween segment from a decade and a half ago. The…
Compare & Contrast: Simpson Family Gambling Problems
“Okay, Marge, let’s go.” – Homer Simpson “I’ll catch up to you.” – Marge Simpson “Marge, I’m taking the car.” – Homer Simpson “I’ll walk.” – Marge Simpson “This late, through the bad neighborhood?” – Homer Simpson “Yeah.” – Marge Simpson “Marge-” – Homer Simpson “Go home, you’re bad luck!” – Marge Simpson “Wait, I see what’s happening here. You’re just mad because everyone in this town loves gambling except for you. Well, that’s just sad.” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons long ago lost all interest in telling stories that are even coherent, much less entertaining or – heaven forefend…
Compare & Contrast: Haunted Houses
“Why are you trying to scare us? Are you trying to keep us from getting close to you? Maybe even loving you?” – Lisa Simpson “Leave me alone.” – Haunted House It is a measure of just how flat out tired Zombie Simpsons is that they can do four different segments for their Halloween episode and have literally not a single one be something they haven’t done before. Fake apocalypse? Did that way back in Season 11. Mysterious gateway to another dimension? Season 7. Time travel with alternate timelines? Season 6, baby. The most repetitive of the four was the…
Compare & Contrast: Suspense Movie Take-Offs
“This can’t be what it looks like. There’s got to be some other explanation.” – Bart Simpson “I wish there was some other explanation for this, but there isn’t. I’m a murderer, I’m a murderer!” – Ned Flanders “Then that’s not the real Ned Flanders.” – Bart Simpson “I’m a mur-diddly-urd-ler!” – Ned Flanders “If that’s not Flanders, he’s done his homework.” – Bart Simpson The Simpsons had a long and proud tradition of using classic movies or plot ideas as the basis of an episode. Being The Simpsons, when they aped something, they didn’t just follow it, they used…