“She’s beautiful. Say something clever!” – Bart’s Brain “I fell on my bottom.” – Bart Simpson “D’oh!” – Bart’s Brain There are a lot problems with “Beware My Cheating Bart”. For starters, it’s kinda sexist and disturbing. Beyond that, it’s further evidence that Zombie Simpsons has turned its kid characters into empty, anti-human nobodies. And, of course, it manages to lack any kind of story coherence while doing all those things. What makes it all more glaring than usual is the way “Beware My Cheating Bart” so closely follows the plot, structure, and even jokes of the boundlessly superior “New Kid on the Block”. One of the most handy things anyone ever told me about sexism was that the easiest way to gauge how sexist something is or isn’t was by reversing the gender roles and seeing how weird or fucked up it would seem. Applying that little rubric, “Beware My Cheating Bart” fails miserably compared to “New Kid on the Block”. In the latter, it would mean a ten-year-old girl developing a crush on the fourteen(ish)-year-old boy next door, showing him that his girlfriend was bad news, and then ending with them bonding as friends by making a prank call. A little unusual, maybe, but certainly not creepy. In Zombie Simpsons, it would mean a fourteen(ish)-year-old boy flashing a ten-year-old girl, then making out with her repeatedly, hanging around with her in little kid pizza joints, and running about town late at night. That is creepy, no two ways about it, and that means you might not want to be doing it at all. Uh . . . yeah, please don’t do that again. Leaving that unpleasantness behind us forever, the best way to shake off the weirdness of having a character the episode identifies as a “total pre-puber” getting hot and heavy in the privacy of the principal’s office is to remember that it’s been a long time since Bart was anything like a normal kid, and the same goes for Jimbo and everyone else in this episode. Just in that first scene in the movie theater, we get sitcom-tastic clunkers like this: Dolph: We’re gonna to be checking out a delightful Hong Kong horror remake known as ‘Crawlspace’, based on Paxing Kongjian. And this: Jimbo: Shauna, food for thought, if we don’t watch movies about torture in crawlspaces, how will we know what to do if someone puts us in a torture crawlspace? Kearney: Not if, when. Shauna: Nah. I’m gonna go see one of those Jennifer Aniston movies where she rolls her eyes on the poster. This kind of stilted, formulaic dialogue is hacktacular on a couple of levels. First of all, what little humor they’re trying to wring out of these fake movies dissolves away when you have your characters basically explain the jokes as they’re saying them, not to mention the movie posters behind them that do the same thing. Ha! That’s what s/he just said. I get it now! I get jokes. More…
Tag: Beware My Cheating Bart
Crazy Noises: Beware My Cheating Bart
“Bart, could you go get the cupcakes?” – Marge Simpson “Cupcakes? Cupcakes. Yes. Sweet cakes for all.” – Bart Simpson As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another. More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things. The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud. So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “water weenie”). In one of the more telling segments of “Beware My Cheating Bart”, all manner of thinly mammary-related foodstuffs are paraded before the audience. First there’s a suspiciously round mound of mashed potatoes, then Grampa calling Bart a “boob” and talking about chicken “breasts”, and finally Marge bringing over a plate of round cookies with little chocolate nipples in the middle. The premise of all of this can roughly be translated as, “hurr, boobz funny”. Now, plenty of people (myself very much included) have a healthy inner 9-year-old that will usually find something like that at least mildly amusing. There aren’t many parts of the human body that aren’t at least kinda goofy, and there’s certainly no harm in the occasional cheap laugh. What’s so amazing about Zombie Simpsons is that they managed to screw up even this most basic form of comedy. Hershey kiss nipples and noting that chickens also have a part on them called “breasts” are silly and juvenile, but the scene where they do this is anything but. It gets introduced with a shocked looking Bart accompanied by the string music of suspense, and that’s before Marge and Grampa proceed to inadvertently traumatize him. Bart spends the whole scene genuinely freaking out, which makes me, the audience member who likes to indulge his inner 9-year-old, unsure how to react. I can’t giggle playfully because Bart is losing it, but there’s no deeper humor or satire either. When Bart goes for the cupcakes in “Duffless”, he’s also traumatized, but there it’s a call back to earlier in the episode as well as a wonderfully salacious Kubrick parody. Bart’s freak out is part of the gag instead of a distraction from it, so there’s no mismatch between what’s going on and what’s supposed to be funny. It’s also worth pointing out that, in the previous scene, Zombie Simpsons resorted to the ye olde tyme movie/television shortcut of we’ll-show-the-girl-from-the-back-because-we-can’t-show-her-from-the-front whereas The Simpsons had a mentally conditioned 10-year-old reach for actual sugar tits on network television. One of those displays a great deal more creativity than the other. I still can’t believe they got away with this. The Standards & Practices…
Underage Sex Shouldn’t Be This Boring
“Mom, this is a little ahead of schedule, but I need help with my love life.” – Bart Simpson “Oh, my special little guy has a sweetheart.” – Marge Simpson “I knew it! Alright Bart, who’s your girlfriend?” – Lisa Simpson “Mrs. Krabappel.” – Bart Simpson In what I assume was an unintentional irony, early in “Beware My Cheating Bart”, the writers had Bart say, “Doesn’t anyone realize I’m only ten years old?”. The episode certainly didn’t, and it managed to be worse than most “Bart gets a girlfriend” stories to boot. Bart seems to vacillate between being an experienced teenage dater and a little kid, sometimes within the same scene. One moment he’s happily going down a slide, and then next he’s getting hot and heavy with Shauna (who is herself of indeterminate teenage years). It would be creepy if it weren’t so dull. However, just one oft repeated story wasn’t enough for Zombie Simpsons this week, so they also had Marge and Homer go through a marital spat. That one got resolved in the most pointless way possible when Marge decorated herself and the bedroom in an island theme, but managed not to notice Bart and Jimbo out the clearly open window. Again, this would’ve been creepy if it hadn’t been so boring and nonsensical. As for the unimaginative Lost parody “Stranded”, I was reminded of their equally insipid Inception parody from a few weeks ago. Lost has been off the air for two years now, and everyone knew it was going to end in 2010 beforehand, which means that if you still want to parody it, you’d better come up with more than the same tired jokes (nothing makes sense, there’s no resolution, it’s all just empty plot twists) people stopped making two years ago. The Futurama alien language plug (it reads “watch futurama thursdays at 10”) was the only thing that was even kind of clever. The Bill Plympton couch gag was kind of interesting, though it could’ve been half as long and gotten through pretty much the same stuff. I suppose it’s true that this is better than the usual, but the novelty of having someone else do the opening is starting to wear off. And speaking of wearing off, Kavner is really having a hard time doing Marge now. She’s been kinda off for a couple of seasons, but the number of times I’ve thought to myself “wow, that really doesn’t sound like Marge” has been way up since the middle of this season. She just doesn’t have the same range she used to, which makes it really tough to put much feeling into anything. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are absolutely atrocious. Just 4.86 million viewers briefly lost all interest in sex last night. That’s the second lowest of all time, displacing “How I Wet Your Mother” in that spot. Four of the five least watched episodes ever are now from Season 23, and the average viewership this year is below…
Sunday Preview: Beware My Cheating Bart
Image bloodied by Dave. No good will come of this: When Bart is forced to chaperone Jimbo’s girlfriend to a movie, she ends up developing feelings for him, resulting in a whole bunch of trouble with the bullies at school. Meanwhile, Homer is persuaded to buy a state-of-the-art treadmill, fully equipped with a television. When Lisa shows Homer that he can access television shows wirelessly, he develops an obsession with watching an old television show from the treadmill, but not actually working out, until Marge decides to intervene. Since it’s not entirely clear as to which is what, I’m giving 3-2 odds that the thing with Bart and “Jimbo’s girlfriend” (where have you gone, Sara Gilbert?) will actually be the A-plot. Of course, these days, all that really means is that it’ll occupy slightly more time after the unrelated first segment than the B-plot.