“I didn’t know they still made TV dinners this bad.” – Homer Simpson
Tag: Itchy and Scratchy and Marge
Quote of the Day
“This is the kind of entertainment they think is suitable for younger and more impressionable viewers!” – Marge Simpson “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?” – Homer Simpson “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to write a letter!” – Marge Simpson
Makeup Quote of the Day
“Is it a masterpiece or just some guy with his pants down? That’s our topic tonight on Smartline.” – Kent Brockman
Quote of the Day
“It’s a tool that every home handyman needs! It’s a jigsaw! It’s a power drill! It’s a wood turning lathe! It’s an asphalt spreader! It’s sixty-seven tools in one! How much would you pay for a machine that can do all this!” – TV Announcer “One thousand dollars!” – Homer Simpson “Oh, don’t answer yet!” – TV Announcer “Oh, sorry.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Join us tomorrow when our topic will be religion: which is the one true faith?” – Kent Brockman
Quote of the Day
“Hey, tomorrow night, how about making some of your patented pork chops?” – Homer Simpson “Sure! . . . Oh, dear, I can’t. I’ve got three protest rallies tomorrow.” – Marge Simpson “Twenty million women in the world and I had to marry Jane Fonda.” – Homer Simpson
He Was Moe Green, Damn It!
“That screwball Marge Simpson, we’ve gotta stop her! But how?” – Roger Meyers Jr. “Drop and anvil on her?” – Cartoon Writer #1 “Hit her on the hear with a piano?” – Cartoon Exec #1 “Stuff her full of TNT then throw a match down her throat and run?” – Cartoon Exec #2 “All your fancy degrees and that’s the best you can do? You make me sick!” – Roger Meyers Jr. Alex Rocco, the voice of Roger Meyers Jr. and the iconic “bullet through the eyeglasses guy” in The Godfather, died yesterday. Our friends over at Flim Springfield have an excellent write-up of his career: RIP Alex Rocco, 1936-2015. Voice of Roger Meyers Jr. If you’re feeling it, his three turns were in Season 2’s “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge”, Season 7’s “The Day the Violence Died”, and Season 8’s “Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie”. So long, Alex, nobody ever had a voice quite like yours.
Quote of the Day
“And, joining us live via satellite from Vienna, the home of Sigmund Freud, the world’s most famous psychiatrist, to give us an insight into the human mind, Dr. Marvin Monroe.” – Kent Brockman “Hiya.” – Dr. Marvin Monroe
Reading Digest: Call for Guest Posts Edition
Between the holiday, the end of the television season, and the fact that it’s now basically summertime, the Simpsons had a pretty sparse week on-line. All those things also mean that it’s time for my annual solicitation for guest posts. If you’ve got something you’d like to say about the show, send it in. We accept rants, cranky letters to the editor that end with “I am not a nut”, well thought out analyses, and just about anything else. Pictures and images are welcome, and we’ll be happy to link back to your Twitter account, blog, or what have you. String a few sentences together, and a tiny slice of internet fame can be yours. You’re certainly welcome to send in something completed, but if all you’ve got is an idea, I’m happy to help you think it through and flesh it out a little. As for this week’s actual links, we’ve got a beaded Bart, memories of Phil Hartman, a Lisa inspired music video, a couple of lists, and one of the junior Murdochs being such a ridiculously callous business executive that I could almost believe he was just trolling poor, hapless Variety. Almost. Anyway, enjoy, and get thee to a keyboard if you want to publish a guest post. What HiFi stereo system is in The Simpsons house? – Stereo geeks take a guess at what kind of system the Simpsons have. Perhaps a Pioneer C-5600? Dear Phil – A nice remembrance for Hartman: I still hear your voice, you know. It’s one of the most soothing sounds in life. Seriously!!! Hahahaha and not disembodied as I go through my day – though it does happen from time to time. Picture it: I’ll see something funny on the subway, and you’re narrating it like Troy McClure. It just takes the hilarity to a whole new level. WWLSR – What Would Lisa Simpson Read Project – Now this is a project idea: since I have been so involved in book clubs recently I thought it would be fun to read the books that Lisa reads on the show, in the order that she reads them. There is a Lisa Simpson book club out there in Tumblr land, but their reading list is missing a few titles, and is also not in chronological order. I’m a little OCD, so I’m rewatching all the episodes from se01ep01 to the current season so I can make a complete list of books read or referenced by Lisa Simpson. I’ve created a group on the Goodreads website (find it here!) but will also post about it and include my screenshots (Yes, I am ridiculously thorough). This post covers seasons 1, 2 and most of season 3. That’s gonna be a lot of reading, and don’t forget that at the end of Season 3 she finally gets a copy of Ethan Frome to call her own. : in remembrance : – Aw: That’s my dog, his name was Bart. Together, we were Bart and Lisa. You know, The Simpsons? He was one…
Reading Digest: No One Cares About the Season Finale Edition
“Aren’t you going to watch the rest of your cute cartoons?” – Marge Simpson “Nah, come on Lis.” – Bart Simpson “Maybe there’s something else to do on this planet.” – Lisa Simpson Thank Jebus, most of the Lego hoopla has fallen down the internet memory hole and we’ve got a full set of great links for what feels like the first time in forever. There’s crazy people driving a Simpsons car across Australia, tons of cool fan made stuff (everything from Homer as a serial killer to a nice Malibu Stacy cross stitch), some fun lists, several people who agree with us, and the most bizarre Bart(ish) statue I’ve ever seen. Better yet, even though the season finale is two days away, nobody seems to care in the least. A few people linked to the typically lifeless preview video, and that was it. Even the recently announced (and sure to be godawful) Family Guy crossover didn’t get any internet love outside of the dutiful stenography of the entertainment press. Enjoy. Are Weezer The Simpsons of the Music World? – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this excellent comparison of two faded 90s icons that completely agrees with us: When looking at the latest Weezer song or the latest Simpsons episode, what’s maddening is that they come off as imposters of their past selves – almost like a cover band or bad fan fiction. Worth the click. Part I: The End of Easter – There is much discontent in virtual Springfield: It is no secret that the Easter event was met with a variety of negative emotions; including disappointment, anger, stress, and frustration. Part II: What Went Wrong – And it’s well justified: Investing your time was the priority, as it should be. Players who stick with something for years are more likely to buy something down the road, as oppose to this event which clearly just wanted players to invest their money, because there was never going to be enough time to win all of the prizes through regular game play. Part III: Economic Voices – But not unexpected: If you truly don’t like these types of events, you’ll have to break the Pokémon mentality (i.e. “Gotta catch ‘em all!”) and accept that you’re not going to be able to earn certain prizes, no matter how often you play the game. Of course this is easier said than done. Much easier said than done, deliberately so. Malibu Stacy – Fan made cross stitch with quote. Bravo, Chloe. Dan LuVisi – Cartoon Heroes As Serial Killers – Very impressive fan made art of just what it says. Homer and Yoshi are particularly cool. For My Bucket List: With gratitude to The Simpsons – A second “to do before death” list inspired by the family. Round 109: Lisa’s Wedding vs. Treehouse of Horror XIV – Welcome back, Nebel. (Oh, and Season 6 obliterates Season 15, but you knew that already.) Losing the Why and How for the What: A Case for Spoilers – There is no such thing as “overfamiliartiy”…
Quote of the Day
“Take a letter, Miss White. Dear valued viewer, thank you for taking an interest in the Itchy and Scratchy program. Enclosed is a personally autographed photo of America’s favorite cat and mouse team to add to your collection. In regards to your specific comments about the show, our research indicates that one person cannot make a difference, no matter how big a screwball she is. So let me close by saying . . .” – Roger Meyers Jr. “And the horse I rode in on? I’ll show them what one screwball can do!” – Marge Simpson Happy birthday Alex Rocco! (Well, he’s a Leap Day baby, but close enough.)
Quote of the Day
“You heard me, I won’t be in for the rest of the week. . . . I told you, my baby beat me up. . . . Oh, it is not the worst excuse I ever thought up.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“I knew all this stuff would come in handy someday. Let’s see now, ah, here it is: the Complete Handyman’s Bookshelf, Volume 1, Spice Racks.” – Homer Simpson
Hey, Everybody, Season 24 Is Over
“Hi, kids! . . . What the . . . is this Saturday?” – Krusty the Klown I’m still going to do Behind Us Forever for this week’s episodes, but the last two days have not been kind in terms of free time. In the interim, how about a little ratings schadenfreude? Sunday’s episodes both scored dismal ratings, with the first one (“The Saga of Carl”) coming in at just 4.01 million viewers, and “Dangers on a Train” bumping up a bit to 4.52 million. The former is good for #2 on the all time least watched list, with even the higher rated second episode coming in at #10. Here is the current bottom twenty in terms of viewers: # S-Ep Airdate Viewers (millions) Episode Title 1 23-21 13-May-12 4.00 Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend 2 24-21 19-May-13 4.01 The Saga of Carl 3 24-20 12-May-13 4.05 Fabulous Faker Boy 4 24-17 14-Apr-13 4.07 What Animated Women Want 5 24-12 10-Feb-13 4.19 Love Is a Many-Splintered Thing 6 23-13 12-Feb-12 4.33 The Daughter Also Rises 7 24-8 16-Dec-12 4.41 To Cur With Love 8 24-19 6-May-13 4.43 Whiskey Business 9 24-18 28-Apr-13 4.48 Pulpit Friction 10 24-22 19-May-13 4.52 Dangers on a Train 11 24-13 17-Feb-13 4.57 Hardly Kirk-Ing 12 24-14 3-Mar-13 4.66 Gorgeous Grampa 13 23-20 6-May-12 4.75 The Spy Who Learned Me 14 23-22 20-May-12 4.79 Lisa Goes Gaga 15 24-15 10-Mar-13 4.85 Black-Eyed Please 16 23-18 15-Apr-12 4.86 Beware My Cheating Bart 17 24-16 17-Mar-13 4.89 Dark Knight Court 18 23-16 11-Mar-12 4.96 How I Wet Your Mother 19 22-18 10-Apr-11 5.00 The Great Simpsina 20 23-19 29-Apr-12 5.00 A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again Of those twenty, nineteen are from Seasons 23 or 24, with the lone exception being from Season 22. Every single episode broadcast since February of this year has made the list. And not a single episode in all of Season 24 was viewed by more than 10 million people, the first time that’s ever happened. (The only one even close came after an NFL playoff game.) In terms of average viewership, Season 24 ran away with the title of least viewed ever. After bumping along in the low seven million range from Season 20 through 22, last season fell down to just 6.13 million viewers on average. Season 24 sunk even further, averaging just 5.47 million viewers over its twenty-two episodes. Now, the usual caveat about these ratings: these are just the overnight numbers. When there are significant changes to them (usually because a sporting event runs long), I make those updates, but these are not the fancy pants final numbers that take into account demographics, DVR viewers, and whatever else advertisers complain about. Nielsen only makes very limited data available to the public (at least, as far as I can tell), so these are the numbers I use, but don’t try reading anything into these in terms of “Will the show get cancelled?”. The thousand monkeys at a…
Reading Digest: Foreign Art Edition
“This will be the art event of the century! The greatest masterpiece of Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo’s David, on a coast-to-coast tour, United States.” – Italian Art Guy “Sir, which cities will be included in your itinerary?” – Reporter “Ah, New York, Springfield, and if we have time, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles.” – Italian Art Guy This week we have four(!) outstanding pieces of serious Simpsons art from a bunch of foreigners. There’s a Canadian, a Frenchman, Brits, and one that I think is Brazilian, but I couldn’t tell for sure, and all of them are excellent and click worthy. There’s also a couple of people marking Groening’s birthday last week, several others who agree with us, two mentions of “Bart’s Comet” since deadly rocks became all the rage last week, and a bunch more links about “The Longest Daycare”. Enjoy. Smooth Charlie’s four part Click of the Week presented in no particular order: The Simpsons – Fractured Language – Art constructed out of frozen Simpsons DVD images, sign language, and wood blocks. Excellent. The Airtight Tavern: Moebius vs The Simpsons – An artist named Quibe has made a worthy addition to those Simpsons-characters-in-famous-art images created by that limpfish guy. Also excellent. The Longest Daycare – Black and white badass image of Maggie, plus there’s Marge, Lisa, Bart and Homer at the guy’s DeviantART page. Simpsons Drawing Club – This is a (relatively) new Tumblr account that is nothing but fan made Simpsons drawings. See here and here for some of the standouts. Happy Birthday Matt Groening: A look back at the legacy of the animation legend – A quick tour of some of what made the show so great that also agrees with us directly and indirectly. For the indirectly, all of the examples it cites for why the show was great (with one tiny exception) come from The Simpsons, not Zombie Simpsons. For the directly, there’s this: Celebrity Cameos Although this later became a hindrance due to including celebrities just for the sake of it, there is a plethora of worthwhile cameos from the illustrious kind. Worth a read, and there’s an awesome, thirteen minute YouTube video that’s nothing but songs (none from Zombie Simpsons). Sketchbook Feb 18, 2013 – This is just a sketch, but check out Kirk wearing a Gudger sweatshirt. 15th February 2013 – Matt Groening’s Birthday – Celebrating Groening’s birthday by watching Duffless, which itself just turned 20 on Monday. Three (Day 47) – A woman took a picture of her son’s “Simpsons magazine” and, tsk-tsk, someone didn’t do the proof reading. ‘The Simpsons’ Oscar-Nominated Short, Starring Maggie And Baby Gerald – Warming Glow, a television blog named after a Simpsons reference, handles the delicate issue of being critical of Zombie Simpsons well here: The short, titled The Longest Daycare, features Marge dropping Maggie off at daycare, and the butterfly-related adventure she goes on while she’s there. In four dialogue-free minutes, it manages to be both funny and charming, which [fill in complaint about newer…
Quote of the Day
“Marge, I’m gonna build you a spice rack.” – Homer Simpson “Oh, you don’t have to go to all that trouble just for me.” – Marge Simpson “It’s no trouble, I got a whole garage full of tools I never use.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“What do you have to say to all those Marge Simpson wannabes out there who wish to suppress David’s doodle?” – Dr. Marvin Monroe “Hmm, I don’t know. I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn’t.” – Marge Simpson
“Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” Spews Truth
“I’ve started a crusade against cartoon violence. I can protect my own children, but there are many others whose minds are being warped every afternoon at four.” – Marge Simpson “That reminds me, I gotta get over to Milhouse’s and . . . play sports.” – Bart Simpson “Alright.” – Marge Simpson “And I’m going over to Janie’s again. We’re going to be, um, making the most of our childhood years.” – Lisa Simpson “Have Fun!” – Marge Simpson “We will.” – Bart and Lisa Simpson They talk quite a bit about this idea near the end, but “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” has always been one of the premier examples of the way the show could be funny about every aspect of something. They are a violent cartoon show, but they’re still able to make violent cartoon shows look bad. Four guys on this one, Groening, Jean, Reiss, and Jim Reardon. 0:35 – Reiss notes that Swartzwelder loves Itchy & Scratchy. 1:00 – Groening recounts how when he was a kid he and his friends would fantasize about what an ultraviolent version of Tom & Jerry would look like. This leads to him introducing Reardon by pointing out that one of the reasons Reardon was hired was because of a short film he made. 1:15 – Reardon picks up the tale of a student film he made called “Bring me the Head of Charlie Brown”, which is funny and ends with, “I got a reputation for doing violent cartoons, which served me well in this episode.” 2:25 – Reiss briefly mentions Herman & Katnip as a truly terrible Tom & Jerry knockoff. 2:40 – Jean points out that they had a running theme in the early years of Homer being an incredibly bad workman, nothing he produces is any good (he cites the soapbox derby racer and the BBQ pit). Too bad these days he’s instantly good at everything. 3:00 – As Maggie goes Psycho on Homer, Reiss mentions how great it was that VCRs existed then, because they could go back and get the scenes right. 3:05 – They all crack up as Maggie hops away. 3:35 – Groening laughs and declares it his favorite moment as Marge wonders where Maggie got the idea as she puts her down right in front of the television. 4:15 – Irony alert. Groening was talking about how they get fan mail asking for Itchy & Scratchy to get their own series, and he had a demo reel of nothing but their cartoons that he’d show to people, but that they’d get numb after about a minute and a half. This prompts Jean to joke that through ten years there probably wasn’t twenty minutes of actual footage because they’re “incredibly quick”. Of course, the last two or three seasons, when they do have Itchy & Scratchy, it’s always some forty-five second long movie remake. 5:10 – Since this was Reardon’s first episode, he remembers that they were at the Christmas party when…
A Heartwarming Tale of Friendship Overcoming Zombie Simpsons
“You know, some of these stories are pretty good. I never knew mice lived such interesting lives.” – Homer Simpson If the only thing the dull eyed, undead colossus of Zombie Simpsons cost the wider world was half an hour on FOX every Sunday, it wouldn’t be a problem. There are a lot of television channels these days, and wasting one more timeslot on a mediocre show that fades from your mind as soon as the credits roll isn’t the least bit meaningful. In the context of the entertainment panoply of the early twenty-first century, everything from movies on demand to the inexhaustible firehose of fun that is the internet, a show as consistently meh as Zombie Simpsons shrinks to near total insignificance. Unfortunately, that stumbling wreck of a television program does more than fill airtime almost no one watches, it dissuades people from watching The Simpsons, a show that, twenty years later, remains brilliant, biting and laugh out loud funny. All over the world there are people who, given the chance, would laugh until they cried upon seeing the ambulance hit the tree, giggle to the point of bladder hostility at the look on the wolf’s face when Krusty announces the secret word, and smile uncontrollably whenever they thought of “sacrilicious”. Instead of that, many of them take a look at two decades of episodes and come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that they don’t want to wade through it all. Life is short, and there are an enormous number of other things to do. When watching it would take so long, why not leave The Simpsons alone? That is precisely the logic invoked here by WordPress blogger mekkalekkah (whose “Heavy Metal” profile picture indicates that she’s favorably disposed toward subversive cartoons): When that show premiered, I worked at night and I never had a chance to watch it. By the time I had a regular schedule, it had been on for so many years I felt like I was way behind. Now it’s been on for so long, there seems no point in starting to watch it now. I have Googled most of the pop culture references such as I, for one, welcome our robot overlords so I can figure out what’s going on if people talk about it. I wish that someone would just make a Best of Simpsons DVD so I could consume it in an unhealthy binge weekend. Ordinarily, this is where I’d shake my fist at Zombie Simpsons and lament that they already made a “Best of Simpsons DVD” and it was called Season 2. Then they did it again and called it Season 3. Seasons 4, 5 and 6 followed in course, and while Seasons 7 and 8 miss in a place or two, they’d be the pinnacle of almost any other program. Happily, I don’t have to do that. WordPress blogger thethousandbookproject did it for me in the comments: I bet I can give you a list of Simpsons episodes to watch…
Quote of the Day
“In preparing for this debate I did a little research, and I discovered a startling thing. There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.” – Roger Meyers Jr. “I see, fascinating.” – Kent Brockman “And there was something called The Crusades, for instance, tremendous violence, many people killed, the darn thing went on for thirty years!” – Roger Meyers Jr. “And this was before cartoons were invented?” – Kent Brockman Happy birthday Alex Rocco! (Well, technically it’s not until Leap Day 2012, but I’m sure he’s learned to make do.)