As part of the promotion for his book Ortved went on Largehearted Boy and created a playlist of songs that are, even in some small way, related to his book and the show. Some highlights: The Damned "Jet Boy Jet Girl" The Simpsons story really begins with Matt Groening in LA in the very early 80s punk scene. This song, originally by Elton Motello, perfectly captures the subversiveness and irreverence of Groening’s early work: it’s a punk track about a gay love triangle whose chorus, "oo-hoo-oo-oo; he gave me head," mocks those 60s surfer tunes which were, at one point,…
Tag: John Ortved
Spurlock & Ortved Updates
For his Simpsons special Morgan Spurlock has been getting various different musical acts to cover the Simpsons theme. Now we can add Andrew WK and People Under the Stairs to that list. Then there’s this radio interview with John Ortved. The whole interview is a little less than twenty minutes, but there are two parts I wanted to highlight. The first is at 10:25 when Ortved discusses how the show actually got on the air. All of this information is in the book, obviously, but it’s much more condensed here and it’ll give you a good idea of just how…
DHS Book Review: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History
“Marge, I’m bored.” – Homer Simpson “Why don’t you read something?” – Marge Simpson “Because I’m trying to reduce my boredom.” – Homer Simpson In countless discussions with other Simpsons fans over the years the one question that always seems to come up is “Why?”, as in “Why did the show get so bad?” I’ve heard a lot of different theories which always seem to boil down to something overly simple, ‘this guy left’, ‘that guy took over as show runner’, ‘they just ran out of topics/ideas’. The reality, as John Ortved documents exhaustively in his new book “The Simpsons:…
Ortved Publicity Train Keeps Rolling
There’s an entertaining interview with John Ortved at the Arts Beat blog at nytimes.com. (Yes it’s the same blog that thinks it’s Season 20, but it’s a different writer.) Promoting anything involves answering the same questions over and over again and this is no exception so there isn’t too much new content here, but there were two things I wanted to highlight. First this rather grim answer: Q. You make a number of references in the book to the decline in quality of the show. Have you ever heard of Fox or the folks behind the show pulling the plug…
Synergy Works at Conde Nast Too
Yesterday I finished reading our free(!) copy of John Ortved’s new book “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. Given that I am a long winded bastard and that there’s a lot to cover (for Simpsons fans and loathers of Zombie Simpsons) we’ll probably have some lengthy posts about it coming up. The short verdict is that it’s mostly awesome and was a very fun read. For today though we’re going to take a look at some of the synergistic on-line publicity the book has started to garner. First up is The New Yorker which fills its word count by blathering…
A Good Sign
I don’t know how many of you follow us on Twitter. Jebus knows I wouldn’t, our Twitter feed is just shy of 100% pointless, even by our standards. But its one useful function was getting us a promotional copy of the new Simpsons book by John Ortved, “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. I’ve just started reading it, and I’m sure we’ll be doing more with it in the coming weeks, but this sentence on page 7 is very encouraging: Around Season 9, it hit a point where the characters and situations became so exaggerated, the comedy so dispensable, and…