“Sorry Fat Tony, I used to think your game was cool. But now I’ve learned that crime doesn’t pay.” – Bart Simpson “Yeah, you’re right.” – Fat Tony This is a terrible episode. As is often the case in Season 12 there’s a mildly coherent idea, Krusty has a daughter he didn’t know about, that degenerates into incoherence when Homer and Krusty have to break into a mob summit meeting to steal back a violin that they mob had because . . . ah hell, you can’t even summarize this episode without babbling on like an idiot. You know what the least bad parts of this episode are though? The Fat Tony parts. And do you know why? It’s because Joe Mantegna is awesome. This was also far an away the best of the Season 12 commentaries to which I’ve subjected myself for the same reason. Joe Mantegna was in the booth with them and he is a one man show. Ten guys on this one, including Castellaneta and the above mentioned Mantegna. Also, when introducing himself, the director seemed kinda down. Not sure why. Regret, remorse, shame, could be anything. 1:30 – Long discussion from Mantegna about how much he likes doing the show. 3:00 – Talking about how this one was written the previous year but didn’t get all the way produced. They refer to episodes like that, jokingly of course, as “holdover, or bad episodes”. Everyone laughs. Again. Sigh. By the way, Homer and Bart have been blowing up the house for no reason whatsoever for about two minutes now and not one of the commentators has mentioned what’s actually going on in the episode. 3:30 – Mildly interesting note that the “illegitimate child” idea was originally a spec for an episode of “The Critic”. 4:05 – They forget that Tom Wolfe wasn’t actually in this one, he was in a later episode. 4:45 – Trivia about Stephen King filming Maximum Overdrive. Still haven’t said a word about what’s going on except for the celebrity guest voices. 5:40 – Story about Christopher Walken at a party. Jebus, this is like listening to a gossip show. 7:00 – Celebrity story about John Updike now. 7:40 – “Krusty’s daughter has been in many many episodes since this episode, right? We wouldn’t bring something like that up and then just drop it.” Laughter. (A brief aside on continuity and the reaction to it: It doesn’t matter. I’ve mentioned this before, but you can start poking continuity holes in this show in Season 1, it isn’t a problem because it isn’t a serial drama. But whenever defenders of Zombie Simpsons feel like scoring a cheap point against critics of Zombie Simpsons they’ll erect the strawman of, “Oh those nerds on the internet, they want everything to make sense, blah blah blah, a wizard did it.” On behalf of rational internet nerds, let me just say that we don’t care about continuity between episodes, but it would be nice if you a)…
Tag: Insane Clown Poppy
John Updike Didn’t Watch Zombie Simpsons
Noted author John Updike died last week. In 2000 he was a guest star in that excruciatingly bad episode where Krusty finds out he has a daughter and proceeds to get into a mob war over her violin. (It didn’t make any sense then, either.) In April of 2001 Updike discussed his guest spot at a “meet the author” type event in Cincinnati; he also said this: I used to watch The Simpsons faithfully until they changed the hour when it was shown, and it suddenly no longer fit with my domestic rhythm. So I can’t claim to be a morbidly avid fan, but I’m basically well disposed towards The Simpsons, (Found via The New York Observer) In case you were wondering, The Simpsons “changed the hour” (i.e. went from being on Thursdays to being back on Sundays) in 1994, between the fifth and sixth seasons. So he bailed out a tad early, but not by much. From this very limited evidence it is obvious that Updike never liked Zombie Simpsons, and would like to see it taken off the air. If that is alright with him, please give us absolutely no sign.