“Man, if this is happening here, I hate to think what’s happening at Euro Itchy and Scratchy Land.” – Professor Frink “Hello? Itchy and Scratchy Land open for business! Who are you to resist it, huh? Come on, my last paycheck bounced! My children need wine!” – French Ticket Guy
Tag: Itchy and Scratchy Land
Swarming with Magic Robots
“See all that stuff in there, Homer? That’s why your robot never worked.” – Marge Simpson The chalkboard gag for Zombie Simpsons this week read “It’s November 6th – – How come we’re not airing a Halloween Show?”. Unfortunately for us, I think they may have actually been confused about it. How else to explain having what passed for the main plot revolve around switching magic robots from good to evil and back again? That wouldn’t have been out of place in a Treehouse of Horror episode and it felt more than a little strange in a normal one. What I think was the B-plot didn’t fare much better. It involved a lot of screaming, Burns getting punted like a football, and an emergency flashback to wind things up after they got lost halfway through the third act. As if to further highlight how empty the whole thing was, they animated Jane Lynch into a character that looks just like she does. Having done so many celebrities as themselves for so long, they may have done that purely out of habit. As usual, the episode was packed with weird out of character moments, people appearing and disappearing at random, and all the other classic Zombie Simpsons problems. They even managed to screw up some of their fan service, including the nerds but having them sound nothing like themselves. Unusually, there were a couple of decent backgrounds and sign jokes, but not remotely enough to make it feel like the episode is anything other than boring. After all, when your episode contains clunkers like “A free movie screening? Of course I can go!” and “with none of the poop”, you’ve got problems that a sight gag or two cannot even begin to solve. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are remarkably similar to last week’s failure. Just 7.97 million people were hard up enough for entertainment last night to watch this thing. Through four weeks Zombie Simpsons is averaging just 7.50 million viewers. Through four episodes last year (including the Halloween show) that number was 7.82. That’s partly the result of one really bad number, but last year at this time Zombie Simpsons was routinely going above eight million viewers and even punched into nine a couple of times. They’re significantly below that at the moment and showing no signs of improving.
Quote of the Day
“Kids, you heard the cartoon rat. If you haven’t already run to your parents begging to go, do it now. You won’t be missing anything funny, I’ll just be sitting here reading this grown-ups newspaper.” – Krusty the Klown Happy birthday Brad Bird!
Compare & Contrast: Shortcuts & How Not to Ruin Jokes
“Alright, we’re here. Let us never speak of the shortcut again.” – Homer Simpson Of all the digressions and clock killing asides that make up “500 Keys”, the one that’s most out of place has to be the not quite Wages of Fear/Sorcerer drive back from the cake store (which made a lot more sense and was vastly funnier in “Mr. Plow”). This episode had four simultaneous plots going on, three of which managed to roughly collide near the end, and yet this wasn’t involved in any of them. It didn’t even have anything to do with the cake that was itself only barely related to the rest of this episode. Zombie Simpsons and decent jokes: a history of not leaving well enough alone. Like so much of Zombie Simpsons, the entire scene is an exercise is making less out of more instead of the other way around. Having sent Homer, the kids, and his cake down a road marked “Suicidal Moron Pass” could’ve been enough. You could’ve cut right from them heading up some mountain trail to them pulling into the driveway with cake splattered all over the interior of the car. Or you could go the other way, have the cake in pristine condition and a joke about how that was easier than expected. Either way it wouldn’t have altered the rest of the episode, as the survival of the cake, which was made to be important during the scene, is completely irrelevant to everything that follows. The last we ever see of the cake is a few bits of it on Maggie when she walks into the kitchen. Instead we’re treated to cliffs, vertical driving and lots of suspense. The least random thing that happens is when some goats fling rocks at them for no reason. It was pure filler from start to finish, and the goats weren’t even given subtitles to lighten things up. As it happens, in “Itchy & Scratchy Land” way back in Season 6, The Simpsons found itself with a similar situation. So, despite Homer’s admonishment, let us speak of . . . the shortcut. North, south, nuts to that! The shortcut is the last of several traveling gags in “Itchy & Scratchy Land”. The nice thing about these little vignettes (Five Corners, the fruits & vegetables) is that they make sense within the story without ever distracting from it. Together they serve to illustrate how long the trip is while giving the show an opportunity to poke fun at the little absurdities of American road trips. And while it’s true that not every one is strictly necessary, they’re quick enough that they never feel excessive or cheap. That’s especially true of the shortcut, which Homer enthusiastically bumbles into with a couple of joke rich lines. This is the very next shot after they drive off down that long, dusty road. Homer’s shortcut is such a disaster that it doesn’t even last for a full musical cue. The jaunty, enthusiastic horn music can’t…
Reading Digest: Robot Apocalypse Edition
“Die bad robots, die!” – Homer Simpson The internet had a minor conniption this week because a computer beat the living snot out of a couple of meatbags at Jeopardy!. One of the meatbags made a Simpsons joke during the final round, and so we have two links about it. The first is highbrow and long, the second is the opposite of those two things, but does have a picture. There’s also lots of links to other meatbag endeavors, like writing about television shows, creating animated .gif files, and bitching about the commercialization of Bacon Day. Attention Scottish readers: Harry Shearer is going to be in Glasgow with his Katrina movie on Sunday. Enjoy. Homer Simpson by Mori – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this awesome papercraft Homer. Top 5 Funniest Simpsons Commercials – There are some Simpsons commercials here, but the French car commercial is the clear winner. funny commercials – There’s some other Simpsons commercials here, but this round goes to the Ikea ad with the toddler (it’s second from the top). A new project: Literature in “The Simpsons” – Cool: Over the next two and a half m… onths, I intend to watch at least the first four seasons (since these are the ones I have on DVD) of an unparalleled TV series as closely as possible, in order to detect ALL (and I mean ‘most’) references to literary works in The Simpsons I can find. Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords? – A rather nice piece about that Jeopardy! computer, The Simpsons, and how even our most advanced machines still misses the point quite frequently. Elementary chaos theory tells me that we’re all gonna die anyway (via). Ken Jennings Is Awesome – Here’s a screen grab of the pathetic human’s futile gag. Taunting the machines like this is a big part of why the computers are eventually going to kill us all. HuffPost Review: I Am – I was all set to praise this as an excellent reference, then I got to the last word: In one of my favorite second-season episodes of The Simpsons, titled "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish," Homer thinks he has eaten poisonous blowfish sushi and has only hours to live. He crams all the things he will miss most into that last few hours, savoring every second he has left on Earth. The next morning, Homer wakes up, glad to be alive after having obviously not been poisoned after all. But his newfound appreciation for the joys of life is short-lived: The show ends with the image of Homer on the couch that afternoon, zoned out while watching golf. Oh, come on! Golf? He’s an erratic bowler! Mad about you, and here’s the evidence – If you’ve read one anti-Valentine’s Day rant, you’ve read them all. But this is better than average for the genre and comes with excellent usage: To quote Lisa from The Simpsons: "Romance is dead. It was acquired in a…
Quote of the Day
“You’ve got to listen to me! Elementary Chaos Theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.” – Professor Frink “How much time do we have, professor?” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Technician “Well, according to my calculations, the robots won’t go berserk for at least twenty-four hours . . . . . . oh, I forgot to, uh, carry the one.” – Professor Frink
Compare & Contrast: Disney, The Simpsons, & Zombie Simpsons
“Yeah, I used to be rich. I owned Mickey Mouse Massage Parlors, then those Disney sleazeballs shut me down. I said, ‘Look, I’ll change the logo, put Mickey’s pants back on!’ Pfft, some guys you just can’t reason with.” – Railroad Bridge Bum Walter Elias Disney is an inescapable presence in American animation. Whether or not you like him, his work, or the giant company he spawned, when it comes to animation you are living in a world he did a great deal to shape. The Simpsons always had some fun with this, enough that SNPP has an entire page dedicated to the show’s various Disney references and parodies. Zombie Simpsons occasionally attempts to do this as well and, as with so much of Zombie Simpsons, falls haplessly short. In “How Munched Is That Birdie in the Window”, Zombie Simpsons had what passed for an Itchy & Scratchy segment that was loosely based off of an old Disney cartoon called “Pluto’s Judgement Day”. I mentioned this in Crazy Noises, but the animation here is really peculiar and I wanted to highlight it with examples. Look at the startling contrast between Itchy and the background here: The two things that jump out are the coloring and the crispness. The cave walls in the background and the podium in the foreground are both colored in various hues and shades. The background especially gets darker to give the impression of a deep recess in the cave. By contrast, Itchy is flat and monochromatic. Every part of his face is the same color; his gavel, clothes and gloves also remain the exact same color and shade no matter what he does: Itchy has gone from far away from the camera to right into the lens, and yet the only thing that changes is the shape of his various parts and objects, nothing in the coloring gives any hint that he’s moved at all. The dramatic lighting of the background is similarly ignored. Itchy got bigger, but there’s nothing other than size to indicate that he’s actually gestured forward. The precision of the lines on Itchy compared with the background is even more jarring. Look at the awkward juxtaposition of his sharp hand against the fuzzy podium. Now compare that to the gavel and the background behind it. The two are identical – sharp lines vs fuzzy ones – which makes the overall image even more awkward because his hand is supposed to be physically on the podium and the gavel is supposed to be far in front of the cave walls. The entire image is muddled because all of the tricks that give depth to the podium and the walls are ignored for Itchy. Now take a look at the Disney original (please forgive the lower resolution, I had to grab this from YouTube): The backgrounds are very similar in that they’re a little fuzzy and make a lot of use of color to both make the podium look tall and the walls look…
Well, At Least They Didn’t Make a “Face”book Joke
“I really wish they wouldn’t scream.” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Technician There’s not much to be said about an episode that spent most of its time expositing its many loopy story conceits. Of course, in between bouts of joke free exposition there were any number of recycled premises, sloppy scene staging, and all of the rest of the usual problems. Four year olds who have to pee very badly can tell a funnier and more coherent story than this. Happily, there’s only one episode left before we’re free for the summer. The numbers are in and though they remain atrociously low they still represent an improvement. 6.26 million people remembered why they never bought Face/Off on DVD, even from the $3 bargain bin. That’s the highest number since the 20th anniversary special and it’s still lower than all but a handful of Season 20 episodes. I’ve run out of creative ways to say the same thing: Season 21 would easily be the least watched season were it not for the 20th anniversary stuff. This week’s numbers fit right into that pattern.
Crazy Noises: The Squirt and the Whale
“Ahhhh! Shark-boy!” – Homer Simpson In our continuing mission to bring you only the finest in low class, low brow, and low tech internet Simpsons commentary we’re bringing back our “Crazy Noises” series and applying it to Season 21. Because doing a podcast smacks of effort we’re still using this “chatroom” thing that all the middle schoolers and undercover cops seem to think is so cool. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “environmentalists”). A couple of weeks ago I pointed out how Zombie Simpsons is extremely careless when it comes to staging and continuity, even within a single scene. Characters just appear and disappear based on whether or not they’re needed that instant. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck don’t do this, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck don’t do this, hell, Family Guy doesn’t even do this! The reason they don’t is that it is extremely disorienting to have a constantly changing number of people involved in a scene. Near the swirling mess that passed for the ending of “The Squirt and the Whale” we can see another example of this carelessness. Homer falls into the water and the sharks immediately surround him: Suspenseful! The sharks circle Homer and it’s played for suspense. Whatever. But then they instantly vanish while he has a conversation with Lisa and the environmental props: Is expositive dialogue is a shark repellant? Or maybe their planet needed them. No sharks are around him whatsoever, they just disappear. They don’t go back to the whales, they don’t do anything else, they’re not wanted so they’re not there. Until it comes time for a second installment of “suspense” about sharks circling Homer: Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, twenty seconds ago. Aaaaaand they’re back. This goes beyond poor or lazy storytelling, or even poor or lazy staging of this single scene. This is “we don’t give a fuck” at it’s purest. Their ending hangs off of Homer being menaced by sharks and saved by a whale. Instead of just leaving the sharks circling Homer while he talked with Lisa and the other two, they got rid of them so they would have an excuse to bring them back for a second dose of “suspense”. They pushed the same feeble emotional trigger twice in one scene. Anyway, here’s some more problems with this episode. Charlie Sweatpants: Okay, so anyone with initial thoughts on this one? Dave: It was a trainwreck Charlie Sweatpants: True. Mad Jon: A lazy trainwreck Charlie Sweatpants: Also true. Dave: They assumed they could tell a Lisa-gets-emotional type story by filling in the blanks Mad Jon: The A and B plot couldn’t even try to run concurrently? Charlie Sweatpants: Good way of putting it. Mad Jon: At least with 2 concurrent plots I can try to be distracted from each one by the other. There was no breathing room here. Charlie Sweatpants: Though, I don’t think that thing with the windmill counts as a plot. Plots have, you know,…
Quote of the Day
“Please, kill me.” – T.G.I. McScratchy’s Waiter
Quote of the Day
“Wait a minute! What was that last thing you said? ‘Grampa’s Little Helper’… what’s that? Which one of you is the mailman?” – Grampa Simpson
Stained Glass Simpsons
On the same day we’re talking about St. Eleutherius of Nicomedia, I come across the work of Joseph Cavalieri, an artist who makes stained glass windows with Simpsons characters. The one on the left is from Cavalieri’s site, the one on the right is from Stuff Boston. Much like that hyper-elaborate Homer drawing from a couple of weeks ago, I’m just incredibly impressed by the skill it must take to create something like this. It’s the little touches that really make it, like Patty & Selma having those conical bras and all of the scrapped televisions beneath Bart & Lisa. (found via)
Dead Homer Society, Meet Twitter.
Lisa: Forget it, Dad. If I ever become famous, I want it to be for something worthwhile, not because of some obnoxious fad. Bart: Obnoxious fad? “Forget it, Dad. If I ever become famous, I want it to be for something worthwhile, not because of some obnoxious fad.” – Lisa Simpson “Obnoxious fad?” – Bart Simpson Have you ever taken a shit or clubbed a baby seal and thought to yourself, “Gee, I wish I could share this meaningful experience with everyone who has a web browser?” Twitter, the obnoxious Internet fad-of-the-moment, is your outlet. And now, it’s ours too. Think of our Twitter account as the terse, spontaneous supplement to our delightfully pedantic blog. Basically, we’ll be using it to post even more Simpsons quotes, anecdotes, and other miscellany for which writing a blog post is excessive. In the process, we’ll be joining such visionaries as idiot savant and soon to be ex-governor Sarah Palin, carbonated high-fructose corn syrup purveyor Pepsi, and noted douchebag Ashton Kutcher. Yes, we have standards with regard to the company we keep. Come join the party and follow us at http://twitter.com/deadhomers to start receiving updates right away. It won’t cost you a dime and plus it’s fun to be part of a fad, even if it doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. In the words of the frog Euro Itchy & Scratchy Land booth attendant, “Who are you to resist it, huh?” “Homer Fail Whale” image from Ed Wheeler at deviantART.
Quote of the Day
“With a dry, cool wit like that, I could be an action hero.” – Bart Simpson