“Damn, I shouldn’t have eaten the mint first.” – Otto Like so many Zombie Simpsons episodes, “The Scorpion’s Tale” is a creaking mess of unconnected segments, many of which have little or nothing to do with one another. Also like so many Zombie Simpsons episodes, many of these segments are ideas and concepts that have already been done years before. For example, at one point in this episode Grampa moves in and acts cranky. “Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish"”, anyone? Then the family visits a pharmaceutical lab where they make a…
Category: Compare & Contrast
Compare & Contrast: Mocking Awards Shows
“You know the rules, awards for excellence in entertainment are contraband, no Emmys, no Oscars, not even a Golden Globe.” – Prison Guard One of the more revealing ineptitudes of “Angry Dad: The Movie” is the way it fails to copy not one, but two different Simpsons episodes that did the exact same thing it did. (This is particularly stunning coming from a show that loves repeating jokes and unabashedly lives off of fan nostalgia.) Of course, both of those older episodes did things much quicker, and managed to actually mock the kidding-but-serious way awards shows take themselves and their…
Compare & Contrast: Self Help Charlatans
“You know, my course can help you with every personality disorder in the ‘Feel Bad Rainbow’. Let’s look at the Rainbow, what’s in there? Depression, Insomnia, Motor-mouth, Darting Eyes, Indecisiveness, Decisiveness, Bossiness, Uncontrollable Falling Down, Geriatric Profanity Disorder or GPD, and Chronic Nagging.” – Brad Goodman Back when the show still had heart and soul, one of the things they liked to do was make fun of the seedier ends of American capitalism. Sometimes this was Dr. Nick hawking his shabby inventions; sometimes it was the customer contemptuous likes of Stern Lecture Plumbing or Ex-Con Home Security. Then one time,…
Compare & Contrast: Mocking 80s Fatherhood
“‘Cosby’s First Law of Intergenerational Perversity: No matter what you tell your child to do, he will always do the opposite.’ Huh?” – Homer Simpson “Don’t you get it, you gotta use reverse psychology.” – Homer’s Brain “That sounds too complicated.” – Homer Simpson “Okay, don’t use reverse psychology.” – Homer’s Brain “Alright, I will!” – Homer Simpson A few months ago, I wrote a post about how you couldn’t really understand where Season 1 was coming from without some grasp of 1980s American television, particularly the enormous number of cookie cutter family sitcoms. The Simpsons, especially in Season 1,…
Compare & Contrast: Gay Bars
“We work hard. We play hard.” – Roscoe In everything but similarity of title, “Homer’s Phobia” is the obvious choice for a comparison episode to “Flaming Moe”. But rather than stacking up the plot structures, characters, and jokes and marveling at how greatly Season 8 towers over Season 22, I want to focus on one small aspect of these two episodes that I think goes a long way toward illustrating the point I was trying to make yesterday. Specifically, it’s easy to see how much more tame and thoughtless Zombie Simpsons is when you compare their gay club, “The League…
Compare & Contrast: Marge and Other Women
“Pleased to meet you. You look like such a happy bunch . . . of people.” – Marge Simpson In film criticism there is a concept known as the “Bechdel Test”, which is a kind of quick and dirty measurement of whether or not a movie has any female characters that rise above the level of tokenism or decoration. There are a few variations, but the basic concept is that there needs to be at least one conversation between two named, female characters that isn’t about a male. I was thinking about this during one of the many scenes where…
Compare & Contrast: Homer and the FBI
“We have places your family can hide in peace and security: Cape Fear, Terror Lake, New Horrorfield, Screamville.” – FBI Agent “Ohh, Ice Cream Ville!” – Homer Simpson “No, Screamville.” – FBI Agent Like a lot of Zombie Simpsons episodes this season, there is more than one Simpsons episode to which I can compare “Donnie Fatso”. As has been pointed out in comments, the similarity to “The Trouble with Trillions” is uncanny, and not in a good way. There’s also the epic fail of Homer’s catchphrase toupee camera, something that the hat from “Homer and Apu” would consider far beneath…
Compare & Contrast: Disney, The Simpsons, & Zombie Simpsons
“Yeah, I used to be rich. I owned Mickey Mouse Massage Parlors, then those Disney sleazeballs shut me down. I said, ‘Look, I’ll change the logo, put Mickey’s pants back on!’ Pfft, some guys you just can’t reason with.” – Railroad Bridge Bum Walter Elias Disney is an inescapable presence in American animation. Whether or not you like him, his work, or the giant company he spawned, when it comes to animation you are living in a world he did a great deal to shape. The Simpsons always had some fun with this, enough that SNPP has an entire page…
Compare & Contrast: Burns Hosts a Party
“This party is over.” – C.M. Burns Over the years, Zombie Simpsons has gutted a lot of the great characters bequeathed to it by The Simpsons. Moe went from being a bitter bartender running various criminal side businesses to a perpetually lovesick wet blanket. Chief Wiggum used to be a gleefully corrupt and incompetent police chief, now he’s their go-to guy when they want a fat and/or stupid joke and Homer’s already in use. I’m not even sure Patty and Selma are on the show anymore. The less said about what happened to Lenny and Carl the better. Burns hasn’t…
Compare & Contrast: Marge & Lisa At Breakfast
“Lisa, there are a lot of people in world who like to tell you what you can’t do. But they don’t always know what they’re talking about.” – Marge Simpson In both “Lisa Simpson, This Isn’t Your Life” and “Separate Vocations”, Lisa becomes afraid that, despite all her ambition, talent and drive, she’s going to end up like her mother. The two setups are as close to identical as can be expected given that they were broadcast nineteen seasons apart. But they take radically different directions once Marge learns of Lisa’s fears. In The Simpsons, Marge reacts like a loving…
Compare & Contrast: Vampire Segments
“This cape is giving me a rash.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson In Season 5’s Halloween special, the final segment is a vampire story. In Season 22’s Halloween special, the final segment is also a vampire story. Let’s take a look at them, shall we? The difference is apparent immediately. The Simpsons starts things off with the family quietly watching television, complete with the dogs playing poker painting in the background as a transition from the lead-in. The news report situates things firmly in the Springfield we’ve all come to know and love: the police are incompetent, Brockman is an idiot,…
Compare & Contrast: Lisa Learns a Sport
“Let’s see . . . football . . . football, homoeroticism in, oddball Canadian rules, Phyllis George and.” – Lisa Simpson There are obviously a lot of ways “MoneyBART” fails miserably in comparison to “Homer at the Bat”, which it consciously aped. But there is a different Season 3 masterpiece to which it is pathetic and terrible in comparison: “Lisa the Greek”. In both episodes, Lisa needs to study a sport she doesn’t know about. In “MoneyBART”, everything about this, from how much she knows at first, to how she goes about it, to what she reads for research is…
Compare & Contrast: Camp Songs
Someday I may run out of examples of how Zombie Simpsons is watery gruel compared to the hearty, nourishing comedy stew that was The Simpsons, but not today. I’d like to compare the camp song in “Elementary School Musical” to the one in “Kamp Krusty”. Both songs take about fifty seconds of screen time, with the one from Zombie Simpsons being a little bit longer. Here are the complete lyrics of the song from Zombie Simpsons: Lea Michele: I, I love the elegant pearls you wear. Cory Monteith: And the starfish shape that constitutes your hair. Amber Riley: You’ll be…
Compare & Contrast: Branson Sign Jokes
A while back I linked to this post by our friend Friz about how the Simpsons has fallen apart. (For another example in his series, click here to see the decline in relevance of Itchy & Scratchy.) What he did was compare background gags from “Bart’s Dog Gets an F” and some piece of shit from Season 16. Long story short, in “Bart Gets an F” a joke might be on screen for only a fraction of a second. In Season 16, things are left on screen for a long time and Homer even breaks the fourth wall by asking…
Compare & Contrast: Counterfeit Clothing
“Oh no, it’s Gloria Vanderbilt, out for revenge!” – Hired Goon Near the end of “Chief of Hearts”, Fat Tony and the gang are counterfeiting clothing in the woods for some reason. Homer and Wiggum are there for some other reason. Homer and Wiggum then get thrown in the trunk for yet another reason. While in the trunk, they have an earnest and humorless heart-to-heart moment that finally pushes their earnest and humorless plot line towards the finish line. As if to underscore how lazy this entire setup is, just about the only stab at comedy in the entire ending…
Compare & Contrast: Nude Burns
“Hey Mom, did he have those spots all over his body?” – Bart Simpson “I heard that!” – C.M. Burns One of the few genuinely interesting things I learned while tormenting myself with the Season 12 commentaries was that Zombie Simpsons isn’t allowed to show ass crack. (Of course, The Simpsons was so fond of cartoon nudity that they had enough for an entire ending credits montage of it by the middle of Season 7.) Now, all shows labor under some burden of censorship, that’s just the way of the world. But Zombie Simpsons doesn’t even try to get clever…
Compare & Contrast: Absent Teachers
There were a lot of recycled ideas, gags, and scenes in “Stealing First Base”. Besides the narrative repetition of Bart getting another girlfriend and Lisa feeling unloved, there were a few specific things as well. The most direct of these came near the beginning, when Bart walked into class to see chaos in Mrs. Krabappel’s absence. Of course, this is extremely similar to the opening of Season 2’s “Lisa’s Substitute”. In “Stealing First Base” the opening chaos in the classroom runs for twenty seconds before we have any dialogue. It includes Nelson spitting in books, Lewis putting a firecracker in…
Compare & Contrast: Car Humor
After we sat through Sunday’s “Rednecks and Broomsticks” Dave and I cleared our heads with some regular Simpsons. We decided that we should watch a good Lisa episode to cancel out the bad one so we threw on “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey”. It didn’t occur to me before we picked it but both of these episodes have extended scenes with the family in the car. In the Zombie Simpsons scene the only thing that happens for almost a minute is the kids playing the “Bonk It” game. It goes on and on (and on and on) and there are less…