Image taken from Wikimedia Commons. “Ah, Mr. Simpson, you’re forgetting the first two Noble Truths of the Buddha.” – Sideshow Bob “I am not.” – Homer Simpson This episode is so by-the-numbers Zombie Simpsons that it might as well be a “How to” manual. Homer acts crazy, Lisa acts sanctimonious (literally), and there’s a Hollywood movie star voicing himself for no reason. It even has the bonus feature of the weird ending. In this case, it turns into an abbreviated Christmas episode with no warning whatsoever with about three minutes to go. Truly bizarre. This commentary is also pretty par…
Category: Lies Make Baby Jesus Cry
“Sweets and Sour Marge” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“But the grocery store sells sugar for thirty-five cents a pound.” – Marge Simpson “And it doesn’t have nails and broken glass in it.” – Lisa Simpson “Those are prizes!” – Homer Simpson This episode is terrible, no two ways about it. It begins with Homer attempting to win a world record (including a bit where all the townspeople roll through town in a giant ball), has a middle with Marge as a moral crusader against sugar, and ends with Homer as a smuggler. It makes no sense, and what few jokes exist are basically stapled to the story as…
“Gump Roast” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Marge, the comedy roast is an American tradition. It’s what gives us the freedom to criticize our social betters. Hey Flanders, you smell like manure!” – Homer Simpson “Uh-oh, better cancel that dinner party tonight. Thanks for the nose news neighbor.” – Ned Flanders This one might set a record for ignoring what’s going on in the episode in favor of unrelated chit chat. (Al Jean even tells another joke, though it’s more of a story.) However, I can’t really blame them, this is a clip show and there just isn’t much here. When they spend two minutes reminiscing about…
“Tales From the Public Domain” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Listen carefully and my words will shape images as clear as any teevee show.” – Homer Simpson This is Season 13’s obligatory “storytelling” episode, where they have three distinct segments. In this case, that means ignoring what’s going on in the episode is a lot easier as they can riff on the source material, so get ready for some half assed analysis of the Iliad and Hamlet. There is also a lot of animation discussion on this one, though it is of the least enlightening kind. There are about four different long discussions that go more or less like this:…
“The Bart Wants What It Wants” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Why would anybody wanna touch a girl’s butt? That’s where cooties come from!” – Bart Simpson This is another one of those Season 13 episodes that blazes around at high speeds, shifting gears at random while not doing a whole lot in the a) making jokes or b) making sense categories. It’s also another in the long line of Bart-gets-a-girlfriend episodes and, like most of them, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and involves a lot of awkward pauses and pointless exposition. The commentary does its best to ignore all this and is greatly aided by the presence…
“Brawl in the Family” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
Image shamelessly stolen from IMDB. “Why don’t we let our guest do it?” – Lisa Simpson There isn’t much to say about this commentary, mostly because guest commentator Delroy Lindo (who did a voice for this episode) basically hijacks it to play Twenty Questions. On the whole this is not a terribly bad thing, it’s mildly entertaining to listen to. But it also means that there isn’t much here for the Simpsons fan, as the commentary turns into every Al Jean interview you’ve ever read. Lindo asks about the history of the show; he asks about why there are so…
“The Lastest Gun in the West” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Bart, stop creating a diversion and get out of here!” – Principal Skinner This is only the third of the Season 13 commentaries I’ve gotten through, but it’s not at all hard to detect some similarities. Whether they’re talking about Branson, Brazil or, in this case, westerns, they can’t stop commenting on the source material as a means of ignoring what’s going on in the episode. This actually happens in Branson! I read this in an article about Brazil! Remember when westerns were popular? It goes on like that while strange and joke free crap parades across the screen. I…
“Blame It On Lisa” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
I had completely forgotten that this was the fake “controversy”/Brazil episode. “Blame It on Lisa” isn’t the world’s most descriptive title, and this is an awful episode to boot, so my forgetting may have been an involuntary defense mechanism. The huffy feelings of the Brazilians are about the only thing that makes this one notable, or separates it and the unwatchably bad “Simpsons Safari” from Season 12. Brazil and Rio de Janeiro are defined entities that can get mad, whereas “Africa” is a general place and nobody can speak for it authoritatively. Other than that, it’s basically the same: a…
“The Old Man and the Key” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“What is this place?” – Nelson Muntz “Branson, Missouri. My Dad says it’s like Vegas, if it were run by Ned Flanders.” – Bart Simpson This episode has a lot of problems, most glaringly the heavy dependence on referencing pop culture, going so far as to have a truly dizzying array of guest voices all playing themselves. But that wackiness comes only at the end, by that point the episode has devolved into a nonsensical series of set pieces that have almost nothing to do with the fact that it slowly becomes a travel episode about Branson, Missouri. (Nevermind that…
“The Simpsons Movie” Makes Baby Jesus Cry (Part 2)
“No, make it a pie. Pies are easier to draw.” – Itchy & Scratch Animator “Okay, a pie.” – Roger Meyers Jr. After spending roughly seven weeks in the optical drive of my laptop, The Simpsons Movie is finally in the custody of the United States Postal Service and on its way back to Netflix. (Which means “Lies Make Baby Jesus Cry” should start for Season 13 in the next few days.) The second commentary was done by some of the animators and directors of the film, and while there is some interesting information in here, mostly it’s a blur…
“The Simpsons Movie” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Well, you know what? I’m glad you’re nervous, because that means we’re on the right track!” – Herb Powell Several weeks ago I came across bobservo’s post about The Simpsons Movie commentary in which he described how the creators of the movie basically focus grouped it into oblivion. There are two commentary tracks on the disc and, having slogged my way through the all-star one (Brooks, Groening, Jean, Castellaneta, etc.), I have to agree with him. The commentary reveals another problem as well, one that resulted from all that focus group feedback, but we’ll get to that in a second.…
“A Tale of Two Springfields” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user kubacheck. “So what’s it like being famous, Dad?” – Bart Simpson “People know your name, but you don’t know theirs. It’s great.” – Homer Simpson I have not watched most of these Season 12 episodes since they originally blighted my television set. I didn’t forget how bad they were overall, but I did forget in just how many ways they’re specifically bad. The opening of this episode takes two whole minutes just to get Homer to make a phone call. They do so with a badger that’s hiding in the doghouse.…
“Trilogy of Error” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Hey Mom, look at me, look at what I can do!” – Homer Simpson “I see you Homer, that’s very nice.” – Grandma Simpson Season 12 was nothing if not a pageant of the trans-mundane and this episode fits right into its dull kaleidoscope. In case you’ve forgotten, this is the episode where they tell three weird stories that are happening concurrently and link them together in various ways. Listening to the commentary it’s very clear that the people behind the scenes were quite impressed with how well all the disparate little events tied together, and they’re right about that. …
“Simpsons Tall Tales” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Ughhh, this goes on for twelve more minutes.” – Krusty the Klown “Trilogy” or “storytelling” episodes like this one, where they have three independent segments, have always been maligned, even by people who think Zombie Simpsons doesn’t suck (check out the ratings, poll, and comments here if you don’t believe me). I’ve always thought the reason for this is that there are no genuinely good trilogy-type episodes. They didn’t do the first one until Season 10 (“Simpsons Bible Stories”) long after the show had begun transforming into Zombie Simpsons and so there’s no well of built up good will from…
“I’m Goin’ to Praiseland” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“What’s with the lead pipe? Were you gonna give my noggin a floggin’?” – Ned Flanders One of the true hallmarks of Zombie Simpsons is the way relationships between characters have changed for the worse. To take but one example, Lenny and Carl were once a pretty normal pair of work buddies and, as work buddies often are, they were hilarious together. Gradually that perfectly workable comedy devolved into not-gay/gay/hetero-life-mate/I-don’t-even-know-how-to-describe-it-because-no-one-in-real-life-is-anything-like-them. They stopped being recognizable characters and became an institution. Much the same thing happened between Homer and Flanders. Homer used to simply resent his neighbor for being a better and…
“Children of a Lesser Clod” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Do you like children?” – Santa Hiring Guy “What do you mean? All the time? Even when they’re nuts?” – Homer Simpson This one is another of the true monstrosities of Season 12 and the commentaries bear that out. In addition to spending long stretches more or less completely ignoring what’s happening, two or three times they’ll be talking about how this or that goofy twist came to be when someone will say something like, “That was Act 1, now in Act 2 we did this.” They don’t seem to care that the story didn’t just stop all of a…
“Insane Clown Poppy” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Sorry Fat Tony, I used to think your game was cool. But now I’ve learned that crime doesn’t pay.” – Bart Simpson “Yeah, you’re right.” – Fat Tony This is a terrible episode. As is often the case in Season 12 there’s a mildly coherent idea, Krusty has a daughter he didn’t know about, that degenerates into incoherence when Homer and Krusty have to break into a mob summit meeting to steal back a violin that they mob had because . . . ah hell, you can’t even summarize this episode without babbling on like an idiot. You know what…
“Homer vs. Dignity” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Well, according to Eternity magazine the feeling of guilt has been linked to the neurotransmitter gamephenomene. Dow Chemical is developing a minty gel which will eliminate excess guilt, but, unfortunately it won’t be on the market for another six months.” – Lisa Simpson This episode has long been notorious amongst connoisseurs of the decline and fall of The Simpsons for the scene where Homer is raped by a panda. Why is Homer in a position to get raped by a panda? Because Mr. Burns is paying him to humiliate himself. Why is Mr. Burns doing that? Because this show is…
“Worst Episode Ever” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“How come I’ve never seen that Itchy and Scratchy before?” – Bart Simpson “Perhaps because you are a pre-pubescent ignoramus.” – Comic Book Guy Like the Sideshow Bob episode, this one has a couple of okay moments, but it isn’t nearly enough to overcome Homer’s overwhelming stupidity, way too much Comic Book Guy doing things that he’d never do, painfully slow dialogue, and scenes that drag on far too long. The hell of it is, this one actually has a serviceable plot in that the only thing you really need to overlook is a couple of ten year olds (that…
“The Great Money Caper” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Do you remember when you lost your passion for this work?” – Lisa Simpson This one continues Season 12’s depressing insistence on nonsense plots and radical twist endings at the expense of, you know, humor or a story. Once again the emphasis is directed more at faithfully reproducing a pop culture concept rather than at satirizing it. In this case they’re trying to send up “con artist” movies like The Sting (which is mentioned in the commentary), but the episode ends up consisting of little more than plot twists followed by explanations and exposition. Now, I don’t recommend anyone watching…