“Why do we need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact.” – Homer Simpson Back at the end of December, reader Brian sent in a link to a video at The Escapist modestly titled “The Simpsons Is Still Funny – Pt. 1”. It’s about five minutes long, and you can view it at the link. The second part, “The Simpsons Is Still Funny, Part 2”, came out a week later. These are the kind of internet videos where there’s a fast talking voiceover accompanied by a series of pictures, memes and other low cost…
Category: Please End This Fucking Show
A Brief Note on Fake Brands
“Another Duff, Homer?” – Moe “Nah, it’s Friday night, Moe. I want to try something special.” – Homer Simpson “Ah, sure, sure, here you go: Düff, from Sweden.” – Moe “Skoal!” – Homer Simpson After the spastic fit of fake brands that was the opening to “The Food Wife”, I and several others pointed out how weak the brand parodies are on Zombie Simpsons. As was brought up in comments, not only were many of them repeats, but they mostly aren’t even creative. Partly this is the same problem that plagues newer Treehouse of Horror episodes: weak source material. The…
“Significant” & “Lasting”: Two Words That Don’t Apply to Zombie Simpsons
“How about it, Luann, will you marry me, again?” – Kirk van Houten “Ooh, no.” – Luann van Houten “Uh, well, uh, can I have my shirts back at least?” – Kirk van Houten “Okay, you heard the lady, why don’t you take it outside, alright?” – Pyro “I’ll be back, prob-probably.” – Kirk van Houten To reinforce my point from last week that there’s really no way to change the show enough to make it interesting again without also destroying whatever is left of its appeal, I’d like to point out the Zombie Simpsons enforced absurdities of this list…
Destroying Zombie Simpsons to Save It
“We’re like this all the time.” – Marge Simpson In response to the renewal news, Split Sider published a list of six ways to improve Zombie Simpsons. They’re willing to acknowledge that the show is a shadow of itself, but they’re still operating under the illusion that it is capable of getting better. It isn’t. Moreover, of the six suggestions they offer, only two of them could result in any real changes, and those would both basically end the show. Before we get to that, however, we should first note that nothing like this is ever going to happen. Zombie…
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…
The Michael Bay Ethos of Zombie Simpsons
“There were script problems from day one.” – Homer Simpson “It didn’t seem like anybody even read the script.” – Bart Simpson “That was the problem.” – Homer Simpson Two years ago, Michael Bay released Transformers 2, a movie that, even by his skewed standards, was vapid, nonsensical and incoherent. At 20% (which seems very generous), it is his lowest rating as a director on Rotten Tomatoes. It made an enormous amount of money, but was so widely pilloried as among the worst movies ever made that Bay himself publicly stated that the third one would be better. In other…
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…
College Students to Zombie Simpsons: Meh
“Someone squeezed all the life out of these kids. And unless movies and teevee have lied to me, it’s a crusty, bitter old dean.” – Homer Simpson If you Google “Zombie Simpsons”, the first result is a post I wrote last year called “The Cost of Zombie Simpsons”. Not being familiar with anything more than the barest outlines of Google’s proprietary alchemy, I can only guess as to why it’s that one and not another. But if I had pick of our back catalog to occupy that choice spot of search real estate (it gets more traffic than all but…
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…
Compare & Contrast: Field Trips
“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…
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,…
That Is So 1991
“Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.” – Jasper (as read by Homer Simpson) Last month, when I was taking all those frame grabs of the seated Cerberus that was the three housewives from “Moms I’d Like to Forget”, I was struck by how modern and colorful their outfits were compared to Marge’s. The next week I noticed something similar in “Flaming Moe”. Characters who’ve been around a long time, like Smithers and Patty, look really out of place next to the one-and-done guests. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that this happens in…
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…
Season 22 Upping the Guest Voice Count
Images shamelessly yoinked from SimpsonsChannel. “Oh, Lisa, this isn’t real. It’s just how you might look if you were a cartoon character.” – Homer Simpson Despite it’s football inflated numbers the last couple of weeks, Season 22 is still on pace to set a record for the lowest ratings. But that’s not the only record it’s on pace to break. Through eight episodes, Season 22 has managed to cram in an astonishing eighteen (18) different guest voices. That’s the most since way back in Season 11 (which had a record breaking 23 through eight episodes), and in terms of people…
“We’re Not Paying You to Talk”
“Examine your scalp for ringworm.” – Spandex Clad Spokeswoman Like most pop stars, Katy Perry’s stock in trade is a meticulously marketed blend of music, fame, and carefully packaged sexuality. Whether you want to have sex with her, have sex the way she does, or condemn both of those desires, there’s something in her songs and public appearances to catch your attention. Being young, white and pretty broadens those appeals about as far as they can go, and she and the people who publicize her are very adept at using that. For evidence of this you need look no further…