“In the spirit of the occasion, I must tell you what I think. You two screwed up royal!” – Mayor Quimby “You know, I really don’t feel like being blamed.” – Bandstand Guy Going all the way back to Season 1, The Simpsons had a knack for telling big and even outrageous stories in a way that that made sense within an episode and in the sometimes strange universe of the show. Whether it was Homer’s safety crusade in “Homer’s Odyssey”, Marge’s campaign against cartoon violence in “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”, or Lisa’s anti-corruption protest in “Mr. Lisa Goes…
Category: Compare & Contrast
Compare & Contrast: The Republican High Command
“Hail, brothers! Coranon silaria, ozoo mahoke!” – C.M. Burns “Mahoke!” – Republicans There were so many nonsense plot twists in “Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson” that some of the worst ones went by so quickly I almost didn’t notice that they had happened. At one point though, they stopped briefly at the impenetrable fortress that is Republican Party Headquarters. That imposing structure made its first appearance in “Sideshow Bob Roberts”, and while this isn’t the first time they’ve revisited it, this one was notably similar because the fiends and ghouls within its walls were doing the same thing they were…
Compare & Contrast: Bart’s Remorse
“Oh, yikes, what is that?” – Bart Simpson “It’s the centerpiece, Bart.” – Lisa Simpson “Well, it’s taking up valuable real estate.” – Bart Simpson As our friend Mike Amato has been plowing through all the old episodes, I’ve been wondering what he was going to say about “Marge Be Not Proud”. This week, I got to find out. He’s a lot more upbeat about the episode than I am, but what surprised me in reading his take was how little we actually disagreed. There really are a lot of good and excellent parts in this episode, and his long…
Compare & Contrast: Maggie’s Silence
“Will that girl ever shut up?” – Homer Simpson The more I think about it, the more “Holidays of Future Passed” feels like a flashy, stripped down remake of a classic movie. The effects are splashier, the budget higher, and the cast larger, but despite the occasionally entertaining scene or idea, the whole thing is a jumble. Too often you’re just marking time until the next segment begins, hoping it’s better than what you’re currently seeing. To illustrate that, I’d like to take a look at a running joke “Holidays of Future Passed” slavishly copied from “Lisa’s Wedding”: Maggie’s silence…
Compare & Contrast: Krusty’s Nadirs
“That dummy doesn’t scare me. I’ve had plenty of guys come after me and I’ve buried ’em all: hobos, sea captains, Joey Bishop.” – Krusty the Klown “Don’t forget the Special Olympics.” – Ms. Pennycandy “Oh yeah, I slaughtered the Special Olympics!” – Krusty the Klown In the introduction to yesterday’s Crazy Noises, I mentioned that “Krusty Changes His Show” should be up there with travel episodes, Homer gets a job, and other serially repeated plots (Lisa gets a cause, Bart gets a girlfriend, etcetera). A corollary to that is the way we see Krusty freak out once he’s at…
Compare & Contrast: Flapping Dickey
“It ain’t comedy that’s in my blood; it’s selling out.” – Krusty the Klown I’ve started quite a few Compare & Contrast posts this season by noting that there were a lot of different possibilities for what to compare and contrast. It’s true as well for “The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants”, the two big, blinking neon obvious ones being the raft trip and Homer becoming an executive. The raft trip in “Boy Scoutz ‘N the Hood” contains things like Flanders doing “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” with the books of the Gospel and Homer actually bragging that they’re all…
Compare & Contrast: Defeating the Bad Guy
“Wait, come back! You can’t do this to me! I’m Charles Montgomery Burns!” – C.M. Burns As an audience member, there are few things more satisfying that a good defeat of a wretched villain. Unfortunately, that also means when things go wrong, when the villain is bland or the ending is weak, it is correspondingly unsatisfying. At the end of the “The Book Job”, Homer and his improbable posse use what Lisa describes as an idea from “every movie ever” to stymie a book publisher who, despite what the music would have you believe, isn’t all that evil. I say…
Compare & Contrast: Conventioneering
“Sorry kids, but this is the one event I want my darling wife by my side.” – Homer Simpson “Oh, well thank you, Homer. But take one of the kids.” – Marge Simpson “Marge, they can’t carry enough candy! They have puny little muscles, not big ropey ones like you.” – Homer Simpson Like last week, there are quite a few aspects of “The Food Wife” which were done better on actual episodes of The Simpsons. There was the family trying out ethnic food, which made more sense and had more to do with the rest of the episode in…
Compare & Contrast: Martin Prince
“You’re killing me, fish. Never have I seen a greater or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me! I do not care who kills who. To catch a fish, to kill a bull, to make love to a woman, to live!” – Martin Prince There was a great deal of nostalgia laden fan service in the (presumably) non-ironically titled “Replaceable You”, which means that there are a great deal of things that could be compared and contrasted. The nerds made an utterly pointless appearance, Homer got an assistant, and Mrs. Glick was apparently killed off while…
Compare & Contrast: Halloween vs. Bad & Baseless Storytelling
“Fine, then you tell one scarier.” – Lisa Simpson “Flashlight please.” – Bart Simpson Ever since its beginning, the Treehouse of Horror series has depended on parodying, satirizing, and outright stealing from movies, television shows, and other stories. When The Simpsons was still itself that meant taking familiar ideas, themes and stories and remaking them in the style, language and irony of Springfield. That sounds simple, but it’s an extremely delicate process. They had to inject enough original ideas and twists to keep things from feeling stale or rehashed, while at the same time not changing the original source material…
Compare & Contrast: Social Relations Among Male Juveniles
“You don’t need an introduction, you’re the worst kid in school.” – Bart Simpson “Thanks.” – Jimbo Jones Among the many, many things that made The Simpsons great that Zombie Simpsons has lost and/or squandered is any sense of relating to the characters or even simple reality. For all of its energy and outlandish plots, on The Simpsons you always knew that the people involved were reacting in a way that real people might react. The characters had character, and they stayed within those bounds. Homer gets involved in outrageous situations, but he’s still a bungling amateur. Even when Marge…
Compare & Contrast: Mob Boss Endings
“I am-a confused.” – Don Vittorio DiMaggio Given its manic-depressive pacing and weird four-segment structure, it’s not always easy to tell when Zombie Simpsons is moving from one act to another. It has a tendency to meander and stutter step its way through what can only generously be called a story, tossing off things that may or may not be jokes along the way. For example, take what was supposed to be the second act of “The Falcon and the D’Ohman”. When we come back from the first commercial break, Jack Bauer is having dinner with the Simpsons at their…
Compare & Contrast: Cliffhangers & Cultural Relevance
“This past summer, all of America was trying to solve the mystery of who shot Mr. Burns, then they found out it was the baby.” – Troy McClure Twas the summer of 1980, and America was atwitter over a television cliffhanger about who had shot a character named J.R. on a primetime soap opera called Dallas. T-shirts were produced, bets were placed, and, if the Wikipedia article titled simply “Who shot J.R.?” is to be believed, that year’s presidential contest even got into the act with jokes and buttons. When the shooter was revealed that autumn, it became one of…
Compare & Contrast: Shortcuts & How Not to Ruin Jokes
“Alright, we’re here. Let us never speak of the shortcut again.” – Homer Simpson Of all the digressions and clock killing asides that make up “500 Keys”, the one that’s most out of place has to be the not quite Wages of Fear/Sorcerer drive back from the cake store (which made a lot more sense and was vastly funnier in “Mr. Plow”). This episode had four simultaneous plots going on, three of which managed to roughly collide near the end, and yet this wasn’t involved in any of them. It didn’t even have anything to do with the cake that…
Compare & Contrast: Lisa’s Rivals
“What do you guys, like, do for fun?” – Alex Whitney “Well, you’ll definitely want to get yourself a good doll. The new Malibu Stacy has an achievable chest.” – Lisa Simpson Back in December, I pointed out that in the Katy Perry Incident, surely one of the low points of the entire decade plus debacle that is Zombie Simpsons, Perry herself was given nothing to do. She showed up, looked nice, and talked about her boyfriend. In total, she was given twenty-seven words of dialogue. A few episodes later, the same benign neglect fell upon Alyson Hannigan, who showed…
Compare & Contrast: Selma & Her Famous Husbands
“Cigarette, Mrs. McClure?” – Waiter “You bet! From now on, she’s smoking for two.” – Troy McClure Once upon a time, Selma married a famous guy for all the wrong reasons and it didn’t work out. Fifteen years later, Zombie Simpsons decided they hadn’t regurgitated that plot line recently, and did it again. I am speaking, of course, of “A Fish Called Selma” and “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony”. There are three specific scenes I want to compare: 1.) Meeting Mr. Wrong at the DMV 2.) Getting Hitched 3.) The Big Reveal (wherein it is revealed that this marriage…
Compare & Contrast: Magic Tricks
“Behold the box of mystery!” – Milhouse van Houten About halfway through the ridiculous (in a bad way) main plot of “The Great Simpsina”, what’s-his-face (The Great Raymondo) takes Lisa under his wing and tells her the secret he’s kept for decades. In yet another example of the way the attention span of Zombie Simpsons is measured in microseconds, the show treats this revelation as poignant and moving, even going so far as to have the old magician finally decide to tell her after he mentions that he has no children and compares Lisa to his beloved and long departed…
Compare & Contrast: Flashback History
“Aw, it’s a boy, and what a boy!” – Homer Simpson “Uh, that’s the umbilical cord. It’s a girl.” – Dr. Hibbert Continuing on yesterday’s theme of the astonishingly excellent episode that aired on Sunday, this week’s Compare & Contrast is highly abnormal. Instead of highlighting how Zombie Simpsons takes ideas that have already been done and manages to make them worse in every possible way, this week’s post gets to stack up two episodes that take equal care with their stories, characters and jokes. Because while the concepts here are similar, nothing is repeated and everything ties together. Unlike…
Compare & Contrast: Big Screens and Ballgames
“Homer! Homer! X-Y-Z.” – Marge Simpson “Examine my zipper, why? Whoops.” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons is nothing if not a heartless and brainless imitation of The Simpsons. Unfortunately for those charged with doing the imitating, the real thing left very few topics uncovered during its run. Consequently, Zombie Simpsons is forced to dig up old ideas, slap a more modern theme on them, and pretend that they’ve done something new. This happens in ways small and large. For a small one, look at the awkward way “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing” dredged up Bart’s crank calls to Moe. …
Compare & Contrast: Homer on Tour
“Has anyone mentioned that Homer doesn’t know anything about mountain climbing, and that this is all crazy?” – Marge Simpson “Well yes, a number of people.” – Neil Just a few minutes into “A Midsummer’s Nice Dream”, more than a decade of accumulated bad habits catastrophically cratered the episode: Zombie Marge: Homie, you know all the bits, maybe you could help him. Zombie Homer: I can’t do reefer comedy, I’m drunk, two different animals. Zombie Marge: Homer Simpson, that man’s albums have given you decades of entertainment, and seen you through some very square times. Help him! Zombie Crowd: [Cheers…