Via springfieldx2 on Twitter I see that Zombie Simpsons made a halfhearted stab at apologizing to Kristen Schaal for misspelling her name last week. Schaal herself even posted a screen grab of it: At first I thought that was nice of them but, as with everything Zombie Simpsons, they have to make it more complicated than it otherwise should be. After thinking about it for a second, it dawned on me that I probably would remember seeing that, and I didn’t. Indeed, the version I saw didn’t have that on the chalkboard at all. As of this writing, neither does the copy on Hulu.com: I’m not sure where the other screen grab came from, though there’s a DirecTV logo in the watermark, but it wasn’t the one I saw, and it isn’t the one currently up on Hulu. Zombie Simpsons: good intentions, wretched implementation.
Tag: Homer Scissorhands
Crazy Noises: Homer Scissorhands
“Homer, what are you doing?” – Marge Simpson “I wanted to surprise you with a kinky summer ’do. How many husbands would do that for their wives?” – Homer Simpson “None, they’d have more sense than that.” – Marge 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 (surprisingly enough, not on “Esquilax”). Matthew brought this up in comments on Tuesday, but the idea of Homer as a hairdresser is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas and/or jobs he hasn’t had yet. There’s the whole “instant professional” thing, but even setting that aside, we’ve already seen Homer attempt – and fail at – cutting women’s hair, and in a salon no less. I try not to care about inter-episode continuity, I really do. After all, this is a comedy where each episode is its own self contained story. It’s not like 30 Rock or Arrested Development where there are subplots and overarching stories that unfold over many weeks. There you need things to make sense from one episode to the next, here you don’t. And it’s just not fair to expect the writers to labor under years of accumulated personal developments and backstories when the show was never designed to evolve like that. But when Zombie Simpsons does shit like this, when they show Homer wildly succeed at things we’ve already seen him spectacularly botch, they do make it hard. Just for good measure: Mad Jon: Well, are you guys ready to get this going? Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, let’s do it. As we seem to like to start with the couch gag recently, was that some kind of record? For length, I mean. Mad Jon: It may have been. It was quite over the top. Also there wasn’t a TV in the exhibit for them to watch. So all that for nothing. Dave: It sure felt that way. Mad Jon: I wasn’t even sure if it was a new one or not. Charlie Sweatpants: I think it was new, I kept being surprised when they found new ways to stretch it out. Mad Jon: I wasn’t going to be surprised either way Dave: It was also humorless and not really all that clever. That they kept it going was quite a feat. Charlie Sweatpants: Someone’s been the museum recently. Mad Jon: Or broken into one. Maybe those t-shirts aren’t selling like they used to. Charlie Sweatpants: Always possible. Speaking of going on too long, I thought the idea of Milhouse…
The Michael Bay Ethos of Zombie Simpsons
“There were script problems from day one.” – Homer Simpson “It didn’t seem like anybody even read the script.” – Bart Simpson “That was the problem.” – Homer Simpson Two years ago, Michael Bay released Transformers 2, a movie that, even by his skewed standards, was vapid, nonsensical and incoherent. At 20% (which seems very generous), it is his lowest rating as a director on Rotten Tomatoes. It made an enormous amount of money, but was so widely pilloried as among the worst movies ever made that Bay himself publicly stated that the third one would be better. In other words, Transformers 2 was so reprehensibly bad that even Michael Bay, a man who often protests (a bit too much) that he doesn’t care what critics think, admitted it sucks. When the movie came out, the pop culture segments of the internet were rife with parodies, criticisms, and every form of snark imaginable. Of those, my absolute favorite was this piece by Rob Bricken at Topless Robot. Driven to the scalpel edge of insanity by the film, Bricken came back by splitting his mind in two and talking himself down. The entire thing is hilarious, and near the very end is something that popped into my head while watching “Homer Scissorhands”: If you had to pick a single scene that exemplifies Michael Bay’s utter disdain for story and continuity, what would it be? When five Decepticons sink to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve Megatron’s corpse. A submarine tracks five "subjects" going down, and when they get there, one of the Decepticons is killed to give parts to Megatron. 5 -1 +1 = 5, right? No, because the sub somehow tracks "six" subjects coming up. Not only is this very basic math, this is the simplest of script errors. It could not possibly have been more than one page apart in the script. And yet Michael Bay either didn’t care to notice or didn’t give a fuck. "Math? Math is for pussies. My movies are about shit blowing up, man." You see that attitude in Zombie Simpsons a lot, all you have to do is replace “shit blowing up” with “Homer screaming” or “guest voices”. But rarely do you see two examples in a single episode where just the tiniest script change could’ve made things make sense, and was neglected anyway. The first, when Milhouse and Taffy see Bart and Lisa in the hall, is more immediately glaring; but the second, when the Wiggums confront Homer outside his shop, is even worse because it could’ve been fixed by changing just a single word. In the second of Taffy’s three scenes, she and Milhouse walk up to Bart and Lisa in the hall. She’s standing right there as Milhouse tells Lisa to lift with her legs not her back: I do not possess any advanced mathematical degrees, but I can count to four. Taffy gazes adoringly at Milhouse, telling him that he knows a lot, and then the scene goes…
Compare & Contrast: Lisa’s Rivals
“What do you guys, like, do for fun?” – Alex Whitney “Well, you’ll definitely want to get yourself a good doll. The new Malibu Stacy has an achievable chest.” – Lisa Simpson Back in December, I pointed out that in the Katy Perry Incident, surely one of the low points of the entire decade plus debacle that is Zombie Simpsons, Perry herself was given nothing to do. She showed up, looked nice, and talked about her boyfriend. In total, she was given twenty-seven words of dialogue. A few episodes later, the same benign neglect fell upon Alyson Hannigan, who showed up to play a girl who had a crush on Bart. All of her lines were about him, for a grand total of forty-two words. To give you an idea of just how small those parts are, the preceding paragraph is ninety-three words. Continuing the tradition of tacitly insulting their female guest stars, this week Zombie Simpsons brought us Kristen Schaal in the thankless and miniscule role of the girl who falls for Milhouse, then breaks up with him and exits stage right, never having uttered even a single punchline. Her character, “Taffy”, is so thinly conceived and her story so flat that she’s only in three scenes. Here’s everything she says in the entire episode: Scene 1: I thought that was beautiful. Yeah. It was romantic and it rhymed. I’m Taffy. It’s a date. Scene 2: You know so much about body mechanics. Scene 3: Here, my love. Anything for my silly-Milli. Not her again. You’re not over, you never were. Milhouse, you’re a great guy, but we’re not gonna work out for one reason. That wasn’t a great day for us, but it’s because you’ll always be in love with her. He likes his apple pie warm and his a la mode cold. Good luck. That’s eighty-five words, and way over half of them come during the break up. There’s nothing wrong with a good break up scene, they can be a lot of fun, but this particular break up is preceded by nothing. As you can see above, there isn’t a single scene, nor even a single line of dialogue, where Milhouse shows himself to still be in love with Lisa. He never mentions her in front of Taffy; he doesn’t even let out a swooning sigh when Lisa intrudes on them at the end. If we take the episode at face value, counting only what it shows us, Taffy decides that Milhouse is still in love with Lisa because Lisa stalked them. Huh? Even the most formulaic romantic comedies give the spurned girlfriend role more characterization than that (they also usually spell the actress’s name right). “Kristin” I could understand, but no one took the time to check “Schall”? (Thanks to bhall87 in comments.) It wasn’t always this way. In its prime and past it, the show routinely had guest stars voicing actual female characters, both kids and adults. They’re too numerous to list here, but…
Everything’s Coming Zombie Simpsons! (Except the Ratings)
“Fritz, you idiot! I didn’t order a boloney sandwich, I ordered an abalone sandwich!” – Kent Brockman’s Daughter Zombie Simpsons is sort of the deluded trust fund baby of television. It has all the money and fame it could want, but had basically nothing to do with acquiring them. (There are only a handful of people still working on the show who had anything to do with its success.) As a whole, the program lives quietly off of its inheritance. Only occasionally does it pause to congratulate itself, a sort of nervous tic designed to perpetuate the pleasing fiction that it really deserves all it has. One such occasion came last night when the show invoked a magical eagle. Ordinarily we could chalk such a pointless gimmick up to the usual mix of laziness and apathy that shoves so many obviously shoddy episodes out the door. But this particular magical eagle wasn’t some throwaway joke, nor was it an aside or even a coherent pop culture reference. It was, rather, a self-congratulatory stab at fan service and nostalgia, conjured up to repeat – verbatim – one of the most quoted Milhouse lines of all time. Someone said “How about a magic eagle?”, then someone else pity laughed, and a show I already took for dead managed to die a little more. The show has done stupider things than this, it has done lazier things than this, it has even done more boringly nonsensical things than this. But has it ever done such a thing strictly for the purpose of outright repeating its own dialog from a time when things didn’t suck so much? The rest of the episode wasn’t much to behold either, but it isn’t all that often that Zombie Simpsons finds a new frontier in lack of self awareness. Anyway, the numbers are in and there was no magic eagle to save them. Last night’s parade of unjustified congratulation was scoffed at by only 5.49 million viewers. That’s the sixth lowest number of all time, and the fourth episode since February to rank in the bottom ten. Unless Wikipedia and epguides are lying to me, there are two episodes left in Season 22. If those two episodes average 5.7 million viewers or less, Season 22 will be the lowest rated season ever. That looked pretty improbable just a month or two ago, but the last few numbers have been really atrocious. C’mon Zombie Simpsons, you can do it! And it’s something you can be proud of, because you did it all by yourself.
Sunday Preview: Homer Scissorhands
Image, watermark and all, yoinked from here. They released a promo image for this week’s episode, but Dave’s still on the run so I can’t get it bloodied up the way it should be. Instead, the picture above is the first Google Image search result for “Homer Scissorhands”, which comes from a now deactivated Deviant Art account. If you want to see the real promo in all its phenomenal drabness, Simpsons Channel has you covered. Here’s the nauseating description: After Homer discovers a genius talent for styling hair and opens his own salon, he becomes Springfield’s most in-demand hair stylist. But having to listen to women’s problems and gossip all day long leads Homer to believe his gift may actually be a curse. Meanwhile, when Milhouse decides to live each day to the fullest, he comes out of his shell and professes his love for Lisa, only to have his heart broken. Milhouse then catches the eye of popular fifth-grader Taffy (guest star Kristen Schaal), causing Lisa to make a bold move. Oh good, more awkward elementary romance and yet another new job for Homer. It’s almost like they’ve done this exact thing many times before.