“Homer, this is a terrible thing that’s happened. But we can’t blame ourselves.” – Marge Simpson“We can and will!” – Homer Simpson“Children need discipline! You can ask any syndicated advice columnist.” – Marge Simpson Happy birthday, George Meyer!
Tag: Bart vs. Thanksgiving
Quote of the Day
“When is that boy going to apologize?” – Selma Bouvier “He sure is stubborn.” – Patty Bouvier “Homer was never stubborn. He always folded instantly over anything. It was as if he had no will of his own. Isn’t that true, Homer?” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Yes, Dad.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Bullwinkle’s antler sprung a leak.” – Homer Simpson “Uh-oh, looks like old Bullwinkle’s kinda got a taste of his own medicine.” – Bill “He certainly did, Bill.” – Marty “Wait, what did that mean? Did what I say make sense?” – Bill “Well, no, not really, Bill.” – Marty “Boy, now I know how the Pilgrims felt.” – Bill “What are you talking about, Bill?” – Marty
Quote of the Day
“We’d like to thank you for the occasional moments of peace and love our family’s experienced, well, not today. You saw what happened! Oh, Lord, be honest: are we the most pathetic family in the universe or what?” – Homer Simpson “Amen.” – The Simpsons “Worst prayer yet.” – Selma Bouvier
Quote of the Day
“Son, your family may be watching. Is there anything you’d like to say to them?” – Kent Brockman “Yes there is, Kent. Ha ha, I didn’t apologize!” – Bart Simpson Sam Simon would’ve been sixty-one today. Happy birthday.
The Simpsons vs. Thanksgiving
“I would say something comforting, but, you know, my voice.” – Jacqueline Bouvier “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” was originally broadcast twenty-five Thanksgivings ago (22 Nov 1990, to be exact). It’s the first episode written by George Meyer (just the 20th episode overall, and the 7th of Season 2), and it’s a great showcase of just how quickly the show began firing on all cylinders. The Thanksgiving episode has everything from blink-and-you’ll-miss-them background gags to gleefully cruel satire of sacred American institutions and self mocking meta-jokes. Underlying everything is the show’s cardinal grace: a family that loves each other even while they don’t like each other. The story centers around Bart’s disdain for Lisa and her resentment of it, but it also covers Marge harshly scolding Bart; Patty, Selma, and Jacqueline trashing Marge; Homer’s indifference to his kids; and Grampa and Homer treating each other like furniture. In the end, they get “one more crack at togetherness” because they actually do love each other; but that only comes after the episode has spent considerable time rolling around in the rich comedy soil of family insults and contempt. Around that is non-stop mockery of all the goofy traditions of modern American Thanksgiving. People watch the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys, and on this sacredly secular day, Homer is gambling against his favorite team and all the idiots in the stands are using flash photography. Hooray For Everything comes out at halftime to celebrate the Western Hemisphere (“the dancin-est hemisphere of all!”) to the delight of Homer-esque dimwits nationwide. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade gets doubly insulted, both for using outdated cartoon characters that kids no longer care about, and for pandering to know nothing 10-year-olds by including a Bart Simpson balloon. (Which they actually did that year.) “Son, this is a tradition. If you start building a balloon for every flash in the pan cartoon character, you’ll turn the parade into a farce!” – Homer Simpson The episode the starts taking whacks at the often awkward and sometimes bitter tradition of having extended family over for dinner. Patty and Selma manage to insult Marge as soon as they walk in the door by having brought their own dinners. Jacqueline Bouvier shows up barely able to talk, but what words she does say express nothing but disappointment and shame at her three daughters. Homer goes to pick up Grampa at the retirement home, where forgotten old people get “turkey puree” and feel hopelessly lonely as the manager reads off an impersonal list of names whose families bothered to fax(!) in an empty holiday greeting. The choice Meyer and the rest of the writing staff present is both clear and bleak: spend the holidays with your family and you get to be miserable while you’re being insulted and put down, or spend it alone and forgotten and you get to be miserable and lonely. “This place is depressing!” – Homer Simpson “Hey, I live here!” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson After Bart and Lisa fight…
Quote of the Day
“And the Silverdome, now ablaze with flashbulbs as Hooray for Everything leaves the field. Of course, a stadium’s much too big for flash pictures to work, but nobody seems to care!” – Football Announcer
Quote of the Day
“Mr. Burns, this is Base Command. The intruder appears to be a young male, age nine to eleven.” – Guard “Release the hounds.” – C.M. Burns
Hooray for Simpsons Day!
“Who the hell is that?” – Bart Simpson “Bullwinkle.” – Homer Simpson “Who? . . . Wait a minute, who’s that?” – Bart Simpson “Underdog, don’t you know anything?” – Homer Simpson “Well, I know it wouldn’t hurt them to use some cartoons made in the last fifty years.” – Bart Simpson “Son, this is a tradition. If you start building a balloon for every flash in the pan cartoon character, you’ll turn the parade into a farce!” – Homer Simpson Happy Simpsons Day, everybody! As in previous years (this is the fifth since we started DHS), we’ll have a mix of fun Simpsons stuff here throughout the day. Feel free to leave any Simpsons related links in comments (self promotion most definitely welcome) or on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, as part of a pre-New Year’s resolution, I’m going to try squandering more of the precious gift of life in front of the twit-box. Since I have no gift for kissing up to celebrities or making pithy observations about trending topics, I thought I’d stick to what I know: quoting cartoon shows. But with so many episodes to choose from, how do you keep from over-repeating some and ignoring others? Easy, by quoting episodes on the day they were broadcast. Some dates have multiple episodes, others have none, but when you put them all on a list, it looks like a fun way to waste some time and have a few laughs. Behold, the December calendar: 17 – Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire-Marge Be Not Proud-Homer’s Triple Bypass 18 – Fear of Flying 19 – Xmas Story 20 – Itchy & Scratchy & Marge 21 – Miracle on Evergreen Terrace 22 – A Taste of Freedom 23 – A Tale of Two Santas 24 25 26 – I Married Marge 27 28 29 – Hurricane Neddy 30 31 You may have noticed that there are some Futurama episodes on there. That’s because Futurama, in addition to being hilarious, is one of the two shows that sprang directly from The Simpsons and is almost as quotable. (The Critic is the other, but it doesn’t have any episode anniversaries until January.) So today we’ll be tweeting quotes from “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, “Homer’s Triple Bypass”, and, yes, “Marge Be Not Proud”. Tomorrow we’ll do quotes from “Fear of Flying”, and then Thursday is our first Futurama episode, “Xmas Story”. If people like it, we’ll keep going. If not, well, it’s not like this site’s archive isn’t already littered with screwy ideas that didn’t work. In the meantime, enjoy your Simpsons Day.
Quote of the Day
“Mom, you made it! How are you?” – Marge Simpson “I have laryngitis and it hurts to talk, so I’ll just say one thing: you never do anything right.” – Jacqueline Bouvier
Quote of the Day
“Ladies and gentlemen, Hooray for Everything invites you to join them in a salute to the greatest hemisphere on Earth: the Western Hemisphere!” – Radio Announcer
Silence Is Golden
“It’s your fault I can’t talk.” – Maggie Simpson Perhaps the only really interesting thing to come out of “Lisa Goes Gaga” was the surprise announcement at the end of “The Longest Daycare”, a 3D short that will be shown before Ice Age 4, starting on July 13th. (FOX has helpfully put the announcement on YouTube, should you wish to relive all ten seconds of it.) At present, everything the internet knows about this thing comes from the brief announcement itself and from a quickie interview Al Jean gave to ew.com. Literally every other story I saw about “The Longest Daycare”, and I saw a lot of them, was originally sourced to this article. Even the Wikipedia page is basically nothing but information from this one piece. So, what’s in it? Mostly it’s just basic plot and background: It will be set back at the Ayn Rand School for Tots. (Though no word on whether or not The Longest Day will be used as rough source material the same way The Great Escape was in “A Streetcar Named Marge”.) Jean teased an appearance from Baby Gerald. It’s four-and-a-half minutes long with no spoken dialogue. David Silverman directed it. It is indeed in 3D (though a 2D "animatic" will be shown at Comic-Con). What’s most interesting here isn’t the 3D or any of the story information. It’s the fact that it’s dialogue free, which means they didn’t have to involve their expensive voice actors at all. It’s more than a little reminiscent of the Coke/Super Bowl ad from two years ago. In the ad, even though they had a newscaster telling us that Burns was broke, it wasn’t Kent Brockman. The only other lines in the sixty-second commercial came from Milhouse, who is, of course, not voiced by one of the six main voice actors. That ad is doubly resonant because the generic news anchor guy was Maurice LaMarche, whom I’m 99% sure was the guy narrating the trailer for “The Longest Daycare”. Without claiming any kind of predictive powers, this short is exactly what I was talking about in Chapter 12 of the book when I compared the future of the Simpsons to what’s happened to Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. Whether or not Homer, Marge or any of the rest of the family appears for a silent cameo, the short represents a new stage in the decoupling of the Simpsons as cartoon characters from their current home on FOX’s Sunday night lineup (and the people who do voice work there). It’s an animated story set in the Simpsons universe and populated with Simpsons characters, but the only things it has in common with the original show are things FOX owns. Obviously this isn’t the first time FOX has leveraged the existing popularity of the Simpsons outside the realm of the show. They’ve been making video games and t-shirts forever, after all. But this is the first time they’ve done so in the form of animated entertainment, and that makes…
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 list of tidbits and quotes is very solid (I’ve always liked “You have entered: power drive”). Where we part seems mostly to be in how much weight we assign to certain problems: If you read this blog then you’re probably familiar with Dead Homers Society, and their attesting that this is the sole blemish on seven flawless classic seasons. I can’t claim some of their gripes aren’t valid; when you boil it down, this is a “very special episode” played fairly straight, with no real twist or subversion. But what keeps it engaging and impacting is its honesty. Certainly some things bother or don’t bother some people more than others. For example, I can’t work up too much excitement over problems with “canon” and inter-episode continuity, but start having characters behave in ways that are anathema to their established personalities and I go ballistic. Mike is willing to overlook the “very special episode” thing, but it really rubs me the wrong way, and it’s the main reason that this is the only episode in Season 7 I almost never watch. “Marge Be Not Proud” was the first time the show really let itself get bogged down with conventional television tropes. They did it in a way that’s subtler than “The Principal and the Pauper”, but both of them are weak stories being propped up by teevee convention (cheap morality for “Marge Be Not Proud” and shocking twists for “The Principal and the Pauper”). Relying directly on old saws like that was something the show had never done before, and it produced episodes that attempt to portray real emotions, but end up undercutting themselves with hoary tricks and tired cliches. That reliance is something Zombie Simpsons would later make almost routine, but in “Marge Be Not Proud” it was novel. They simply didn’t used to do things like that. Consider a similar story of Bart misbehaving and then redeeming himself, “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”. Both episodes are built around holidays, but, more importantly, both episodes involve Bart acting out and Marge dealing with it. When Marge yells at Bart in “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”, all the emotional weight of the episode is condensed into a single devastating line that comes like a kick to the stomach: “I hope you’re happy, Bart, you’ve ruined Thanksgiving!”. That is Marge at a full boil (and a bravura delivery by Kavner), and for Bart it comes completely…
Quote of the Day
“Now, before we sit down to our delicious turkey puree, I have some happy news. The following people have relatives who wish they could be here today: Antonovsky, Conroy, Falcone, Martin, Thorson, and Walsh . . . oh, and Mrs. Spencer, you too.” – Springfield Retirement Castle Guy “Oh, I knew they wouldn’t forget me.” – Mrs. Spencer
Quote of the Day
“Listen guys, I was thinking, um, unless you feel weird about taking money from a kid, I thought maybe . . .” – Bart Simpson “I wouldn’t feel weird, would you?” – Bum #1 “No, I’m comfortable with it.” – Bum #2 Happy Birthday Greg Berg! (At least, I think it’s his birthday. It’s been removed from his Wikipedia page, but on the old revision it says December 14th.)
Quote of the Day
“Ohh, what a hit!” – Gil #1 “Oh yeah, he’s out cold, Gil.” – Gil #2 “Oh, yes sir, looks like they’ll be feeding him Thanksgiving dinner through a tube.” – Gil #1 “Hope they can fit a turkey in there.” – Gil #2 “Get on with it, Gil.” – Gil #1
Quote of the Day
“And lord, we’re especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is . . . except for solar, which is just a pipe dream.” – Homer Simpson Happy 20th anniversary to “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”! Original airdate: 22 November 1990.
Collectable Cookies
“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I enjoyed it. And I don’t know why I’ll do it again.” – Bart Simpson Shitty, unimaginative marketers have long taken advantage of the idea of “collecting”. The basic premise is simple enough: you create a group of things, and all but dare people to spend money getting them all. The more they get, the better for you. It’s simple, easy and profitable; and on some level it even makes sense, e.g. all the players on a Major League roster, or all the main characters from a Star Trek series. Not surprisingly, the marketing jackasses behind Simpsons merchandise are big fans of this idea. For example, should you find yourself at Comic-Con this weekend, you can get an “exclusive” Lard Lad figurine, amongst other FOX intellectual properties. I see press releases and news posts all the time touting Set X of Characters Y from Company Z. However, profiting from people’s desire for completeness, exploiting that urge to have the entire set, can cross over from simple exploitation into an unthinking reflex. If you give a lab rat a treat every time he presses a lever, he’s going to press that fucking lever until his arm falls off. It is in that context that one must appreciate this most recent example of Simpsons merchandise. These are Simpsons cookies. From the looks of things they appear to be some variety of short bread, no big deal there. But take a look at the packaging and you’ll see the addict’s word “collect”. Indeed, every package comes with one of thirty(!) “MEGA MAGNETS” “to collect”. As you can see from the photo at right, at about two inches long there is nothing at all “mega” about them. In fact, the word “mega” has been so ill applied here that one has to wonder whether or not they are even magnets. The urge to conjure something collectable has become borderline pathological for the people behind Simpsons merchandise. How else can one explain using the cudgel of collectability to sell a few extra packages of a perishable foodstuff? In different circumstances, this kind of monomaniacal focus would be grounds for psychiatric medical treatment; here, however, we’ll have to content ourselves with a hearty round of pointing and laughing from the internet peanut gallery. Ease down, fellas, for your own sake. I’m sure you have plenty of other tricks up your sleeve when it comes to conning people into thinking a drawing on the package makes something valuable, why not use another one for a change?
Simpsons Script Goes Under the Hammer in Britain
“Hey, you’ve got to be eighteen to sell your blood, let’s see some I.D.” – Nurse “Here you go doll face.” – Bart Simpson “Okay Homer, just relax.” – Nurse “Oww!” – Bart Simpson This is cool. Not only is this a production script for Season 2’s excellent “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”, but it’s signed by Maggie Roswell. Here’s the story (via CDInsight): The 28 year-old has had the script in his possession for almost 20 years after it was given to him by one of the voice actresses. Adam used to help his parents at their Aberfoyle B&B in Creag-Ard House and in the summer of 1990 a group of American ladies visited. His father Andrew said: “The ladies were very taken with him but when he wasn’t helping out, all he did was watch ‘The Simpsons’. “When they found this out, one of them said she was a friend of one of the people who did the voices. “And a few weeks later, a script from the show arrived at our home for Adam.” That last part doesn’t quite make sense because, as you can see below, Roswell listed the voices she does an included “Sharry Bobbins”, who didn’t exist in 1990. (And wouldn’t be first aired until 1997.) Also the note asks if he remembers this one, but it wasn’t broadcast in the States until November of 1990, I’ve no idea when it would’ve made it to Britain. So I think the script may have shown up a little bit later than just a few weeks after the visit, but I don’t think that minor mix up matters in the least. I emailed the auction house and they were kind enough to reply with the image of the script. It sold to an Midlands collector for £340 (plus the 20.13% “buyer’s premium” made the final price £408). Image courtesy Dominic Winter Book Auctions, all rights reserved. Ironically enough none of the characters listed there are actually in this episode. SNPP has Roswell credited as both the blood donor nurse and “Mrs. Spencer” (who feels slightly less unloved when her family faxes her on Thanksgiving). Still, that’s very cool. Updated: I really should read everything before I push “Publish”. According to the auction house listing, in addition to the script itself there’s also : an accompanying letter and airmail envelope (August 1998), plus a colour publicity photo for The Simpsons and a photograph of the young Adam with the sender of the letter and script, Liz Beerman So they got the script in 1998, which makes sense. So much for my detective work.
Quote of the Day
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user brandonink2001. “See Maggie, those silver and blue guys are the Dallas Cowboys. They’re Daddy’s favorite team, and he wants ’em to lose by less than five and a half points. Understand?” – Homer Simpson Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Incidentally, the Cowboys are 12 point favorites over the Raiders this afternoon.