“I think we lost ’em! Hey, and we’re at the ballpark! Alright, two birds with one stone!” – Otto
Tag: Dancin’ Homer
Double Secret Makeup Quote of the Day
“Did the team ask you to dress like that, Homer?” – Marge Simpson “Nope. This was my own bright idea!” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Ah, sitting with the employees. I guess this proves I’m their friend. You did get me something on an aisle, Smithers? I don’t want to be surrounded by them.” – C.M. Burns
Quote of the Day
“I think I could actually hear the air being torn, sir.” – Mr. Smithers “Oh, shut up.” – C.M. Burns
Quote of the Day
“Don’t fill up on those vegetables, kids. Save room for your nachos.” – Homer Simpson “Alright!” – Bart and Lisa Simpson
Reading Digest: Hooray Season 2 Edition
“Look, there’s only one thing worse than being a loser. It’s being one of those guys who sits in a bar telling the story of how he became a loser, and I never want that to happen to me.” – Homer Simpson “Please, Homer.” – Barney Gumble “Yeah, come on, Homer.” – Moe “Well, okay.” – Homer Simpson We’ve got three links about Season 2 this week, and not just “here’s a thing that happened in this episode”, but lots of love for the whole season. Excellent. In addition to that, Hank Azaria got a new part, there’s some cool fan art, further evidence that old sitcoms were atrocious, a new ebook about the show, and a cool retrospective on Julie Kavner’s non-Simpsons career. Enjoy. An alternative Simpsons timeline – I don’t agree with everything in Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week, but it is a very thoughtful overthinking of what the show could’ve been if it had aged the characters and gone off the air before the Fall. More early rough sketches and drafts from David Silverman – I love the one of Homer ridiculing Marge from “Blood Feud”. They don’t even attempt that kind of expressive animation anymore. The Hollywood Bowl’s 2014 summer season includes Beatles, ‘The Simpsons’ tributes – The weekend of September 12-14 there will be three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl celebrating the 25th anniversary of the show with fireworks. Sounds fun, but tickets don’t go on sale until May. Marge Simpson’s Julie Kavner Is a National Treasure – Indeed she is. Click through for a recounting of her career and a picture of her from what looks like her mid twenties. Fashion Spotlight: Big Trouble Mixes The Simpsons and Big Trouble in Little China – Fan made mashup image of the two. I especially like Burns as Lo Pan with Blinky on his forehead. Scripting (Comedy): The Simpsons, Season 2 – Oh, nothing, just some quotes from the first seven episodes of Season 2. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? – Episode #028 – Ash is down on this one: Infuriated, Herb hops on a bus but before leaving he hisses to Homer that he has no brother. As Lisa said, “his life was an unbridled success until he found out he was a Simpson.” I guess all Simpsons are meant to have bad luck in their lives. It’s more than just luck, it’s that they’re inherent losers who expect defeat and keep going anyway. Robert & Homer Simpson: When Composers and Comedians Share a Name… – As even the post itself admits, there isn’t much at this link. There is, however, a cool drawing of Homer playing a guitar with the lines coming out of some sheet music. My 14 Favorite Episodes of The Simpsons, season 2 – It’s just a Season 2 kind of week: This was a tough list to make as the second season of The Simpsons doesn’t really have any bad episodes. Proof of that is a list of favorites that covers nearly…
Quote of the Day
“Bart was strangely quiet. Later he explained he was confused by feelings of respect for me. It wouldn’t last.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“A Simpson on a t-shirt, I never thought I’d see the day.” – Marge Simpson Happy birthday James L. Brooks!
Some Simpsons Day YouTube
“Oh, Marge, sitting next to the boss, the best night of the year and it’s ruined!” – Homer Simpson Last year Simpsons Day fell on a Saturday and I got to spend the whole thing sitting on my ass and watching cartoons. Sadly, today is a work day, but there’s still plenty of great, old Simpsons stuff to enjoy on-line. For starters, check out this 1990 interview with Groening, Brooks and Simon: Near the end, the interviewer asks about all the merchandise (remember, this was the absolute height of Bartmania), and Groening plugs some of the upcoming licensed crap: We’ve got some great stuff on its way out, just stay tuned for the Nintendo game, and the Simpsons pinball machine, the official Bart Simpson vehicle of destruction, that’s a skateboard, and lots more. The great big flashing neon irony of the video comes when Groening is asked about the origin of the show and, referring to the original bumper shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, says: I think it’s a very insidious way of keeping people paying attention to a TV show is to make little short cartoons about the length of a commercial so people had to pay attention. If you blinked you’d miss them when they were on the Tracey Ullman show. The interviewer then asks, “Did you draw them immediately the way they are now?”, to which Groening responds: Well, if you watch them on Lifetime, cable, you’ll see that the Simpsons have transformed quite a bit since the early days. Ha! Now 1990 is the early days, far more so than 1987 was at the time. Speaking of 1990, to give you an example of just how immensely popular and phenomenal the Simpsons were at the time, here is a “video yearbook” from some high school’s 1989-90 school year: Season 1 had just finished airing when this was made, and Bart not only gets the last word (it’s right at the end), but he also gets about as much time as the Berlin Wall coming down. In a similar high school vein, take a look at this marching band performance of the opening theme in 1990: The cameraman isn’t doing anyone any favors here, but note the big cheer that goes up from the crowd at the 15 second mark when they recognize the theme. It’s much bigger than the cheer that the band got before they started playing Elfman’s catchy masterpiece. Finally, this is a video from 1990 produced by British Sky Broadcasting for “dealers”, which I presume means the middlemen who have to decide whether or not to carry the channel. Basically, it’s an in-house promo for how great their programming is and why it’s worth carrying. At the 7:30 mark they talk about Sky One and how it reaches tons of younger viewers, and they specifically cite The Simpsons as a big reason why. When the promo starts, it not only calls the show “the smash hit of the 90s”, but it contains…
Season 2 Marathon: 22 Episodes, 22 Beers, 8h:23m:51s
“I can’t think of a better place to spend a balmy summer’s night than the old ball yard. There’s just the green grass of the outfield, the crushed brick of the infield, and the white chalk lines that divide the man from the little boy.” – Lisa Simpson “Lisa, honey, you’re forgetting the beer. It comes in seventy-two ounce tubs here.” – Homer Simpson Good morning and welcome to the sixth Simpsons-Beer Marathon. Today we’re doing Season 2. As with previous efforts, I will make use of the pause and reverse buttons to get a quote right or take a screen grab, but the fast-forward button will go totally unused. Since I’ll be in no condition to do it later in the day, Chapters 11 & 12 of the book are on-line right now. That gets us through the bulk of the text. Most of the appendices are short, and I’ll put them up sometime next week. Serious thanks once again to everyone who has read the book, found one of my mistakes, linked it somewhere, or actually bought it. And now, it’s been Simpsons-Beer Marathon day for hours and I’m still not drunk yet, so let’s get going. 1. Bart Gets an F And we start off with Martin’s book report, which is simultaneously flattering to Hemmingway and making fun of people who take him too damn seriously. “I will not fake my way through life” They made all those crappy video games based on this show, and yet they never made Escape from Grandma’s House in real life. For shame. This show that jokes about school bus crashes. That is all. Ah, faking sick to leave school. “As a result, Bart is an underachiever, and yet he seems to be, how should I put this, proud of it?” – Less than ten minutes into Season 2, and they’re already making fun of “Bartmania”. The defeat in Martin’s voice as he retreats to the “forecastle of the Pequod” is just awesome. Speaking as someone who was the same age as Martin and Bart when this episode was first broadcast, I can’t say enough about how recognizable the two of them were to me and my friends. We didn’t get into as much shit, but they felt like real kids to us. Case in point for the above: waiting for the radio guys to announce if school was closed. These days they do it by e-mail and there’s no suspense, but at the time that’s exactly how it happened. It actually says “Diamond” on Quimby’s podium. “John Hancock’s writing his name in the snow!” Yet another great example of how they snuck things past the censors. Joking about bodily functions is right at the top on the list of things that aren’t allowed, and they did it with the Declaration of Independence. 2. Simpson and Delilah “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” was/is (not sure if it’s still on) yet another case of life imitating The Simpsons. Hitler, North…
Reading Digest: Summer Ephemera Edition
“I’m sorry, young man, you’re just not ready. Pick up your check at the front office and for god’s sake put some clothes on!” – Dave Rosenfield The internet pickings were slim this week. I don’t know if it was a hangover from the Fourth or just general summer doldrums, but we do have some summer links, including an RC car, a Spanish clip from “Summer of 4Ft 2”, and a nice baseball story. There are also a couple of lists, an upcoming screening of Harry Shearer’s New Orleans movie, some excellent usage, and even the thinnest of tie-ins to the Murdoch-phone hacking scandal. Enjoy. Rosenfield evolving with the Tides – See that picture of the manager firing jockstrap Homer? He was named by Ken Levine, who worked as a broadcaster before he wrote “Dancin’ Homer”. The real Rosenfield was recently honored by the Norfolk Tides for fifty years of service to the minor league team. How To: Frankenstein-Mod your Bart Simpson Chia Pet – Instructions with lots of pictures (including the finished product) for turning an officially license Bart Simpson Chia Pet into a Frankenstein’s Monster. Sweet. Homer Simpson Custom Car/Airplane – A custom build remote controlled car with Homer on top of it. Harry Shearer Talks About Tearing Down the Army Corps of Engineers in The Big Uneasy – If you’re in the Bay Area you can see Shearer on Sunday night at the Roxie Theater. There’s a 7pm and a 9pm show, and he’ll be there after the 7 and before the 9. Bart Simpson – Drama – Great fan made drawing of Bart crooning at full Goulet/Bennett levels. Michael Chertoff Totally Looks Like Mr. Burns – Enh. The perils of cleverness – Just because you can do something slightly clever, doesn’t me you should: And in comedy, it results in a mode of humor in which pop cultural references and winks to the audience have replaced real comedic situations. For this last manifestation, which is probably the saddest of all, I can do no better than quote George Meyer, the legendary writer and producer for the best years of The Simpsons: “Clever,” Meyer notes, “is the eunuch version of funny.” Simpsons Video of the Week – Our friend Lenny found a Spanish version of the very end of “Summer of 4 Ft 2”. Awesome. Jessie J tweets she’s on ‘bed rest’ after emergency foot surgery – English singer Jesse J broke her foot and then tweeted this: I feel like Bart Simpson in the episode when he had broken his leg and couldnt play out… #staresoutthewindow Some quick math says she was six years old when that episode was broadcast. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the kids are alright. Michael Jackson Never Sang On The Simpsons – Following up from last week, we can add RTT News (Global Financial Newswires) to the list of people too lazy to Google the Michael Jackson singing thing before writing it up. Rather breathlessly writing it…
Quote of the Day
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user bryce_edwards. “Ah, the Gammills, good to see you.” – C.M. Burns “You’re an inspiration to all of us in waste management, sir.” – Mr. Gammill “Well, take your mind off contaminants for one night and have a hot dog.” – C.M. Burns
Compare & Contrast: Big Screens and Ballgames
“Homer! Homer! X-Y-Z.” – Marge Simpson “Examine my zipper, why? Whoops.” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons is nothing if not a heartless and brainless imitation of The Simpsons. Unfortunately for those charged with doing the imitating, the real thing left very few topics uncovered during its run. Consequently, Zombie Simpsons is forced to dig up old ideas, slap a more modern theme on them, and pretend that they’ve done something new. This happens in ways small and large. For a small one, look at the awkward way “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing” dredged up Bart’s crank calls to Moe. Times have changed and crank calling doesn’t really exist anymore, but that didn’t stop Zombie Simpsons from haphazardly trying to cram its bloated, rotting foot into the glass slipper. Not only would Moe be able to instantly identify Bart as the sender (as anyone who’s ever used a cell phone knows), but why does he read it aloud? When it was a phone call looking for someone at the bar, he called out the name like a person in his position ordinarily would. Now that it’s a text message, there’s no reason for him to say it out loud, even if it had been a mildly plausible fake name. The scene was just Moe saying “I. M. A. Wiener” as though he was reading from a cue card. “Mike Rotch”, “Jacques Strap”, “Seymour Butz”, the whole gag is that these are names that are actually jokes. What’s “I. M. A. Wiener”? Not a single part of this works. It’s like that kid from grade school who told a joke and got a laugh, and then kept telling the same joke long after everyone else had moved on. For a larger example, we turn to family sports outings. In both “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing” and “Dancin’ Homer”, the family Simpson takes a trip to a ball game courtesy of Charles Montgomery Burns. The differences start to pile up before the family even arrives at the stadium. In “Dancin’ Homer”, we hear that the family is there because it was “Nuclear Plant Employees, Spouses, and No More Than Three Children Night”. This setup takes just a couple of seconds, is perfectly consistent with Homer’s role in life as a faceless blue-collar slug, and even sneaks in a joke about how cheap Mr. Burns is, all in a single line of dialogue. (And it’s immediately followed by Otto’s fantastic two birds with one stone line.) Zombie Simpsons is incapable of such a quick and well crafted opening. Instead it serves up more than two minutes of Burns and Smithers in an old time hot air balloon, all the plant employees just hanging out in the parking lot (with rifles), a cathedral that materializes out of nowhere and then vanishes just as suddenly, and Burns personally rewarding Homer. It’s everything The Simpsons never was: overwrought, drawn out, illogical, you name it. Things get worse when Zombie Simpsons finally gets to the stadium. …
Crazy Noises: The Blue and the Gray
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Sarah_Ackerman. “Well, I guess it’s back to good old Springfield.” – Bart Simpson “But I can’t go back, not after I’ve seen the bright lights of Capital City. I’ll wither and die like a hothouse flower!” – Lisa Simpson In our ongoing mission to bring you only the shallowest and laziest analysis of Zombie Simpsons, we’re keeping up our Crazy Noises series for Season 22. Since a podcast is so 2004, and video would require a flag, a fern and some folding chairs from the garage, we’ve elected to use the technology that brought the word “emoticon” to the masses: the chatroom. Star Trek image macros are strictly forbidden, unless you have a really good reason why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (disturbingly enough, not on “Pedobear”). One of the things I’ve noticed about Season 22 so far is that Springfield resembles Hollywood more and more with each passing episode. Just this season we’ve seen this humble Midwestern town acquire a massive private school, a big budget production of Wicked, and a seemingly endless supply of hopelessly trendy restaurants and upscale nightclubs. It’s almost like Springfield is exclusively inhabited by a bunch of highly paid writers who think civilization ceases to exist south of Wilshire. [Note: Dave couldn’t join us again this week. He swears he’s going to have time for us soon, but we know better. It’s okay, we love him anyway.] Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we get this unpleasantness over with? Mad Jon: Yes. Let’s begin Charlie Sweatpants: Where to begin? There’s so much suck here. Mad Jon: Was that Pie Man flying next to Bartman in the opening? Charlie Sweatpants: I think so. I’ve never forced myself to watch that one. Mad Jon: That was the eye opener for me. Charlie Sweatpants: While I applaud their efforts to stock the opening with lots of changes each week, all they ever seem to do is reference older crap. Mad Jon: That must have been season 13 or 14, I don’t know, but I remember I watched like half of it and it was like coming out of a coma. I knew the Simpsons was no longer what it was, but I was most assuredly in a "It’ll get better right?" mode. Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, that never happened. Mad Jon: I know that now, but back in the early 2000’s when I was no longer watching first runs regularly, I figured it was like boiling water. Charlie Sweatpants: You just ignore it long enough and it’ll get there? Mad Jon: Something like that. Charlie Sweatpants: There were a lot of things that needed to be ignored for a long time in this one. I doubt it set any kind of record, but man there were a ton of jokes that took way too long. Mad Jon: Yeah, that seems to keep happening Charlie Sweatpants: The Cat Lady opening comes to…
Quote of the Day
“Last year you got a little rambunctious and mooned the poor umpire.” – Marge Simpson “Marge, this ticket doesn’t just give me a seat. It also gives me the right – no, the duty – to make a complete ass of myself.” – Homer Simpson Happy 20th anniversary to “Dancin’ Homer”! Original airdate 8 November 1990.
Quote of the Day
“My wife and kids stood by me. On the way home I realized how little that helped.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“You’d think the players’ wives would be a little closer to the action.” – Marge Simpson “Actually this section is for the players’ ex-wives.” – Ex-Wife #1 “And then I found out that all the while there was this bimbo in Kansas City.” – Ex-Wife #2 “Throw at his head!” – Ex-Wife #1
Quote of the Day
“I can’t help but feel that if we had gotten to know each other better my leaving would actually have meant something.” – Lisa Simpson
Quote of the Day
“I wonder why stories of degradation and humiliation make you more popular.” – Homer Simpson “I don’t know, they just do.” Moe Syszlak
Quote of the Day
“You throw like my sister, man!” – Bart Simpson “Yeah, you throw like me!” – Lisa Simpson