“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…
Tag: Flaming Moe
Crazy Noises: Flaming Moe
“I’ve got to fire that agent.” – Elizabeth Taylor 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…
Compare & Contrast: Gay Bars
“We work hard. We play hard.” – Roscoe In everything but similarity of title, “Homer’s Phobia” is the obvious choice for a comparison episode to “Flaming Moe”. But rather than stacking up the plot structures, characters, and jokes and marveling at how greatly Season 8 towers over Season 22, I want to focus on one small aspect of these two episodes that I think goes a long way toward illustrating the point I was trying to make yesterday. Specifically, it’s easy to see how much more tame and thoughtless Zombie Simpsons is when you compare their gay club, “The League…
A Flapping Dickey of Outdated Gay Jokes
It goes almost without saying that American culture has changed in a lot of ways since the Simpsons family came on stage in the late 80s. In addition to the usual twists and turns of taste in everything from music and clothing to movies and cars you would expect over any two decade stretch, the last twenty plus years have also seen an enormous expansion in the civic space afforded to gay and lesbian Americans. People who were seen as so culturally toxic that even referring to them on television was all but forbidden in 1989 have become commonplace in…