“Bart, think I can ever find another one like her?” – Milhouse van Houten “You’re asking the wrong guy, Milhouse. They all look alike to me. Now, let’s go whip donuts at old people.” – Bart Simpson
Tag: Bart’s Friend Falls in Love
Quote of the Day
“We’re out of Subliminally Slim.” – Warehouse Guy “Enh, just send him the vocabulary builder.” – Other Warehouse Guy “Here ya go, fatso.” – Warehouse Guy
Quote of the Day
“This is Fuzzy Bunny. About a year ago, he noticed his voice was changing. He had terrible acne. And had fur where there was no fur before.” – Troy McClure
Quote of the Day
“Any questions?” – Mrs. Krabappel “Mrs. Krabappel, how come you don’t live with Mr. Krabappel?” – Nelson Muntz “Because, Mr. Krabappel chased something small and fluffy down a rabbit hole.” – Mrs. Krabappel
Quote of the Day
“I’m sure this is a little scary for you, dear.” – Mrs. Krabappel “Uh-huh.” – Samantha Stanky “So, why don’t you stand up in front of the class and tell us about yourself? I’ll be grading you on grammar and poise.” – Mrs. Krabappel
Quote of the Day
“I’m a good student, Principal Skinner.” – Samantha Stanky “Yeah, sure, and they told me I’d get a big parade when I got back from Nam. Instead they spat on me. I can still feel it searing. . . . So, let’s just see what the permanent record has to say, shall we? Hmm, no detention, fairly good attendance record, oh, I see you beat that bed wetting problem in the second grade.” – Principal Skinner “That’s in there?” – Samantha Stanky “Don’t worry, they’ll forget. . . . Just like they forgot about me in that tiger cage for eighteen agonizing months. Every night I wake up screaming! . . . Well, let’s meet your classmates!” – Principal Skinner
Quote of the Day
“Class, in order to explain why your hormones will soon make you an easy target for every smooth talking lothario with his own car and tight jeans, I will now show a short, sex education film. Ezekiel and Ishmael, in accordance with your parents wishes, you may step out into the hall and pray for our souls.” – Mrs. Krabappel
Quote of the Day
“Everybody on, but no shoving! Just kidding, you can shove all you want!” – Otto
Reading Digest: The Simpsons Will Outlive Us All Edition
“Hey, Bart, according to this magazine, in another million years man’ll have an extra finger.” – Lisa Simpson “Five fingers? Eww, freakshow.” – Bart Simpson For obvious reasons, this site takes the position that The Simpsons was and is the greatest show ever. (Zombie Simpsons naturally excluded.) Of course, plenty of people disagree about that for one reason or another, but the nice thing about being a Simpsons advocate is that I get to cite examples, lots of them. For instance, this week we have a link to an article about the best sitcom of the 1990s, the author presumes that The Simpsons is grander than all of them and excludes it because it isn’t quite a sitcom. We also have an interview with Anne Washburn, author of the Mr. Burns play, in which she discusses considering and rejecting a number of other television shows for her premise. We also also have someone explicitly saying the show will never die while pretending to praise Zombie Simpsons. And that’s before we get into the tattoos. And while I can think of no reliable source of information to prove it, I’m willing to bet that Simpsons is the most tattooed show in history. Oh, and we’ve got usage, fan art, and all the other usual stuff. Enjoy. 35 Simpson Tattoos – Whoa, are there some good ones in there. I’m partial to Homer as the jack-in-the-box from “Treehouse of Horror II”, Rod and Todd on the thumbs, and Floreda. Baphomet Lisa is pretty evil too. As a bonus, here’s another one via Maggie Roswell’s Twitter: BWW Interviews: MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY’s Anne Washburn Ponders Pop Culture After the Apocalypse – The play is coming to Minneapolis, and this is a great observation: Q: What about “The Simpsons” do you think captures people’s imaginations enough that it would survive a nuclear meltdown? A: I think people would remember really enjoying it. And it’s a show in which the humor is so verbally precise that lots of people enjoy the act of remembering it even now, and so I think chunks of it would be in readiness. “verbally precise”, yes. NewsRadio was the best sitcom of the 1990s – The link above also has a bit about other shows she considered, but statements like this are part of the reason why The Simpsons won out: This is a high honor. The ’90s featured a host of great sitcoms. There was Seinfeld and Roseanne and Frasier and Friends and The Larry Sanders Show, all shows that are the ancestors of so many great shows on the air right now. (They also had the golden years of The Simpsons, which I don’t classify as a “sitcom,” because it’s animated. Accuse me of splitting hairs, if you must.) You can have a debate about Newsradio versus other shows. You cannot have one about The Simpsons. It’s so absurd that it gets its own explanatory parenthetical in the opening paragraph of an argumentative article at a mainstream media site. The Simpsons Get A Film Noir Makeover – Some of…
Compare & Contrast: Overprotective Fathers
“Samantha!” – Mr. Stanky “Dad!” – Samantha Stanky “Noooooo!” – Mr. Stanky As far as nothingburger girlfriend characters go, Kumiko is so empty that she makes the relatively one-dimensional Rene from Season 9 look like Katniss Everdeen. Rene at least talked to Moe before dating him out of pity. Kumiko apparently fell in love with Comic Book Guy without even so much as meeting him. But even that vacuous characterization is rich and deep compared to Kumiko’s father, who shows up out of the blue and instantly becomes the focus of the episode despite failing, after his very first scene, to do what he said he was there to do. And, of course, per standard Zombie Simpsons operating procedure, he doesn’t get a name. Back in Season 3, the show gave us another father who didn’t want his daughter dating one of Springfield’s losers. He also didn’t get a first name, but in that case it didn’t matter because by the time he was on screen for his one scene, he’d already been a shadow over their doomed romance from the beginning of the episode. I speak, of course, of Samantha Stanky’s father, Mr. Stanky, in “Bart’s Friend Falls In Love”. To understand how The Simpsons could make a better character despite his having only one scene on screen and just four lines, it helps to look side-by-side at how and when each of them is introduced and expanded. Mr. Stanky (which is hard to type without giggling a bit) is mentioned for the first time in the middle of the first act, just three minutes into the episode, when Samantha, forced by Mrs. Krabappel to introduce herself in front of the class while being graded on grammar and poise, says: We just moved here from Phoenix. My dad owns a home security company. He came to Springfield because of its high crime rate and lackluster police force. Right there, with the man himself most of the episode away from even being seen, we can form a mental picture of the guy. He owns a security company, and he’s willing to uproot his family and move across the country to a city with lots of crime because of it. We know right away that he’s not a sentimentalist and probably isn’t someone you’d want to screw around with. By contrast, Kumiko’s father doesn’t show up until twelve minutes into the episode, at what I guess is supposed to be the first or second act break (Zombie Simpsons makes it hard to tell). Up to this point we hadn’t heard of him at all. He didn’t rate so much as a toss off line from Kumiko or Comic Book Guy about her father maybe not wanting his daughter pulling up stakes and moving to America to live with some dude he’s never met. They had eight minutes left to fill, so you knew something had to keep the new lovers from riding off happily into the sunset, but the episode is so…
Quote of the Day
“Operator, I’d like to place an order for my husband.” – Marge Simpson “Would he like to lose weight, stop smoking, learn the state capitals, master hostage negotiations . . .” – Subliminal Tape Operator “Hmm, hostage negotiations . . .” “Listen, Taboli, we’re ignoring all of your demands. What do you say to that?” – Hostage Negotiator Homer “Better give me the weight loss tape.” – Marge Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Hey, Martin.” – Bart Simpson “Bart? This is the first time anyone has ever sat next to me since I successfully lobbied to have the school day extended by twenty minutes.” – Martin Prince
Quote of the Day
“Americans have grown up with the image of the jolly fat man, Dom DeLuise, Alfred Hitchcock, and, of course, Santa Claus. But in real life, Santa would be suffering from gall stones, hypertension, impotence, and diabetes.” – Kent Brockman
Quote of the Day
“Samantha, I’ve always been suspicious of transfer students. Other principals try to unload problem cases that way. Lord knows I do.” – Principal Skinner
“Zombie Simpsons” Update
“To those who doubt the power of the magic 8-ball, I say: behold my F!” – Bart Simpson You may have noticed that since last weekend the “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” pages have undergone some revisions. The text of the book here at the site is now completely updated to the official 1.1 version of the text. In addition to that, the main page has been revised to account for the fact that the book is now completely up at the site and not being parceled out chapter by chapter. The Kindle version has similarly been updated. If you are one of the wonderful human beings who has already purchased it, you should be able to update to the 1.1 version by downloading the book again. You already own the book, so you won’t be charged again, it’ll just replace the old version with the new one. Amazon warned me it might take up to 48 hours for the update to fully propagate, but by this weekend it should be there. If you experience any problems with this, please let me know. (For those of you waiting on the ePub and PDF versions, I must ask a little more patience. It’s a bit of pain to update the text across different formats, so I’d like to give 1.1 a little time to see whether or not any other mistakes shake loose before I put it into two more formats.) Most of the revisions in version 1.1 are minor, correcting stray punctuation and the occasional overlooked error like referring to “A Streetcar Named Marge” as “A Streetcar Named Desire”. However, there are now three additional footnotes, all of which are the direct result of feedback from you guys. The smallest is a quick aside in Chapter 12, noting that Hank Azaria has not, in fact, been in every episode. That was just a simple oversight on my part. I knew that he hadn’t been, it just never occurred to me during all the times I looked at Chapter 12. The other two are a bit more substantial, and I want to credit the three people who made them possible. The first comes at the beginning of Chapter 2, where I finally acknowledged the existence of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, a syndicated Hanna-Barbera sitcom that ran in the early 1970s. This one is wholly due to generalsherman67’s comment on the original book post. There are quite a few episodes up on YouTube, and it’s about as forgettable as you’d expect. It’s a standard mom-dad-kids setup, there’s lots of canned laughter, and the animation is much less detailed than The Flintstones or The Jetsons. But it does exist, and now the book reflects that. The second is in Chapter 4. On the original, Residents Fan mentioned that The Simpsons had been a big part of Sky One becoming a mainstream channel in the UK. No sooner had I made a note to look into…
Quote of the Day
“Hello, I’m actor Troy McClure, you kids might remember me from such educational films as ‘Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly’, and ‘Here Comes the Metric System’. I’m here to provide the facts about sex in a frank and straightforward manner. And now, here’s ‘Fuzzy Bunny’s Guide to You-Know-What’.” – Troy McClure Happy 20th Anniversary to “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”! Original airdate 7 May 1992.
Compare & Contrast: Bart and Milhouse Fall Out
“Whoa, I bet the 8-Ball didn’t see that one coming.” – Bart Simpson “Yeah.” – Milhouse van Houten With so many years of backstory hanging over its head, Zombie Simpsons often resorts to the inane and bizarre to keep believable and long established relationships fresh. Once upon a time, Moe was Homer’s bartender. Sure, they knew each other a bit better than the average rag and coaster jockeys, but they never strayed too far from the recognizable baseline of bartender-customer. Along the same line, Skinner and Chalmers used to be junior and senior in a dumb bureaucracy and Lenny and Carl used to be office buddies. All of those have been trashed under a half-clever veneer of self knowing television tropes. Homer and Moe are best buddies when they need to be; Skinner and Chalmers are attached at the hip, and Lenny and Carl are . . . whatever they are. In that same vein, Bart and Milhouse have gone from plausible boyhood friends to an overtly self-aware pair of co-dependent jokers. When The Simpsons still cared about its audience and characters, Bart was the dominant half of a realistic friendship and Milhouse was the forgiving and easily awed sidekick. That’s a pretty good basis for fiction, and it worked for a long time. But even an archetype that durable can only hold out for so many hundred episodes before it becomes a stereotypical hack job. At this point, their roles have gone beyond “well established” to “crap, how do we make this not a complete repeat?”, and that’s the real problem of their half told story in “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”. Bart and Milhouse have fought before, many, many times. Sometimes it was a minor part of the episode, like “Bart After Dark” or “A Milhouse Divided”; sometimes it was a major part of the episode, like “Homer Defined” or “Bart Sells His Soul”. But for comparison to “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”, nothing is closer than “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”. In both episodes, Milhouse gets pissed at Bart for taking him for granted. And in both episodes, Milhouse eventually forgives Bart. The difference is in how those things happen, both the falling out and the rapprochement. In The Simpsons, Milhouse gets mad because of a serious betrayal; in Zombie Simpsons, Milhouse snaps with no warning for no real reason. On the other end, Milhouse in The Simpsons sees his beef with Bart resolved; Milhouse in Zombie Simpsons goes with the flow because he knows just as well as the audience that things have to get back to normal. Sadly, this is what passes for normal these days. In “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”, the opening scene is a town meeting at Moe’s that becomes a dance party. (Of course it does.) In the course of said meeting, we see the two of them dancing together to Lionel Richie, and the following exchange happens: Bart: That’s even sadder than being friends with Milhouse. Milhouse:…
Somewhere, Birch Barlow Doesn’t Weep
“Bart, I don’t want you to see me cry.” – Milhouse van Houten “Oh come on, I’ve seen you cry a million times. You cry when you scrape your knee, you cry when they’re out of chocolate milk, you cry when you’re doing long division and you have a remainder left over.” – Bart Simpson A few episodes ago, Zombie Simpsons had Krusty point out that because of the lead time of their animation they come off looking like cheap, late-to-the-party hacks when they try to do topical shows. That fundamental problem was all over last night’s year late Glenn Beck-Tea Party episode. The subject matter was stale and the satire was stuff that has been done better elsewhere, but the place you can see it most is in the little tricks they use to make this expired milk seem fresh. They ran current jokes in a news ticker, they had static images of the Republican presidential field on a table, with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain’s photos crossed out with easy-to-add-late graphics. They know that these episodes don’t work well, but they went ahead and did it anyway because if you can take some potshots at Glenn Beck a year after he was dumped off television and add in some political jokes no one will care about two months from now, then you have to do it. Of course, problems with stale topicality were accompanied by other typical Zombie Simpsons problems. There was a main story that did not manage to make sense for more than two minutes. Characters appeared and disappeared at will, most egregiously when Nugent showed up at the breakfast table immediately after Lisa was talking as though he wasn’t there. And there was plenty of really pointless slapstick, including Homer getting hurt, kids lining up to be randomly fired into an archery target, and Homer dumping paint on his own head. Watching this, I really can’t help but think the staff would rather be writing for Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show. Sketch comedy is clearly what they like doing, politics provides and endless supply of cheap jokes, and things like Homer’s airplane freakout at the beginning are right in that four or five minute sketch show sweet spot. After that one we got Homer on someone else’s talk show, Homer on his own talk show, and Homer thinks he travels to the past, among others. Of course, all that was supposed to be happening against a background story of a national political movement, but they didn’t pay much attention to that so I don’t see why the audience should have to. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are really, truly awful. FOX didn’t have a late football game, but CBS had Pittsburgh-Denver going to overtime at 8:00pm, which meant that a mere 5.11 million people remembered Ted Nugent after the Steelers came back to tie it late. That’s easily the lowest so far this season and is tied with Season 21’s “Million…
Quote of the Day
“We just moved here from Phoenix. My dad owns a home security company; he came to Springfield because of its high crime rate and lackluster police force. All my friends are back in Phoenix, and this town has a weird smell that you’re all probably used to, but I’m not.” – Samantha Stanky “It’ll take you about six weeks, dear.” – Mrs. Krabappel
Quote of the Day
“How do we know when we fall in love?” – Samantha Stanky “Oh, don’t you worry. Most of you will never fall in love and marry out of fear of dying alone.” – Mrs. Krabappel Happy birthday Marcia Wallace!