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, considered rebellious. It’s gender-bending, loud, and fun – everything those people who didn’t actually live in the 80s enjoy thinking it was like. The show was indeed very subversive in a way that it no longer is. That was a big part of what made it successful and the lack of it is a part of why it sucks now. Rolling Stones "Yesterdays Papers" I’m ending with a Rolling Stones track because, as John Alberti says in my book, "Maybe The Simpsons have stretched it into the Rolling Stones because the Rolling Stones are so corporatized now it’s really hard to imagine that they were ever subversive or edgy or countercultural. It seems like they’re beating a dead horse to pick up a paycheck," which I think is a very accurate description, if you watch any of the current episodes. The Stones may be my greatest rock band in history, just as The Simpsons are probably the greatest TV show ever produced – which is why it is especially sad to watch them both ride so ingloriously, not into the sunset, but towards the bank. I understand and largely agree with that, but there’s an important difference. The Rolling Stones are a bunch of guys getting paid and cashing in, no doubts there. But they’re also the ones making the decisions. Whereas Zombie Simpsons, while it pays the cast and some of the writers extremely well, continues not because they want it to, but because it makes too damned much money for a faceless corporation. Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read.
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 indebted we all are to James L. Brooks. Right after that, at about the 13:00 minute mark, is a discussion between the host (pro-Zombie Simpsons) and Ortved (anti-Zombie Simpsons). Ortved knocks it out of the park here but still manages to be politely Canadian. Well done.
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: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”, is that it is a question without a straight line answer. No one decision ever set the show irrevocably on a course for mediocrity. Nor was there one incident or feud that destroyed whatever it was that made The Simpsons unique. It was a wild and chaotic ride from the start and the real miracle isn’t that the show has lasted for two decades; it’s that it was as good as it was for as long as it was. Ortved calls his book an “oral history” and that’s as good a description as any. He’s done an enormous amount of interviews with people who were instrumental to the show, from writers to animators to people who knew James L. Brooks and Matt Groening way back when. For the folks he couldn’t interview, Groening and Brooks included, he combed through old interviews they had given to other media outlets and quotes them within the context of what he’s asking. This tactic, while understandable and effective, creates some odd juxtapositions. It doesn’t quite flow to have a quote from Groening (or someone else who wouldn’t grant an interview) that was uttered when the show as in its infancy right next to something someone may have said in 2007 or later. I don’t see any way this could have been avoided, but it does make for strange reading from time to time. The interviews Ortved has conducted are absolute gold though, and they make up the bulk of the book. Here are the first hand accounts of how the animation process was begun, how the people who worked on The Tracey Ullman Show thought the Simpsons stacked up against the other bits, how the writing staff viewed what they were doing. It’s a treasure trove of information, gossip and hilarious war stories. Ortved has divided his book into eighteen chapters, but it breaks relatively cleanly into three main sections. The first and, for me at least, the most informative is about the deep background of the show. This includes sections on Groening’s “Life in Hell” comic strip, the chaotic beginnings of the FOX network and the pre-Simpsons history of James Brooks’ Gracie Films. The ramshackle and frightfully coincidental nature of the earliest Simpsons work is on full display and it really makes one appreciate just how lucky we really are to have ever gotten The Simpsons in the form…
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 at some point soon? A. In terms of its spiral, to be fair to the writers, there’s only so much you can do with a set of characters. I mean, 20 years? I don’t know how they do it. But if they’re still trying to break ground, they should have canned it 10 years ago. But I don’t see them ending it anytime soon unless it becomes unprofitable. They just opened “The Simpsons” ride at Universal Studios, and I see a trend in that way. In the interviews I conducted, someone compared Matt Groening to Walt Disney. “The Simpsons” is a brand at this point that is as recognizable or getting to be as recognizable as Mickey Mouse and Disney, and I don’t know why they can’t have a Simpsons Land at some point. It’s the “unprofitable” part that really scares me, and not only because that’s when Troy McClure said it would end. FOX can afford to run whole seasons of new episodes as loss leaders (and it wouldn’t surprise me if they already are) because advertising is way less than 50% of Simpsons revenue. If the people in charge think the show needs to be on the air to keep the merchandising going then it doesn’t matter how bad the actual content gets. The ratings will have to become humiliatingly low to damage the brand. That hideous USA Today article we linked back in June made that much clear. Simpsons Land? Why not. On a less sad note, Ortved has good taste in quotes: Q. Give me your three favorite lines. A. This is really hard. O.K., No. 1:. “Does whiskey count as beer?” — Homer (after being asked by a TV announcer, “Are you on your third beer of the evening?”) No. 2. “That man is my exact double … that dog has a puffy tail! [Chasing the dog] Heehee. Puff!” — Homer (on seeing a man who looks as exactly the same as him, lying bloodied outside Moe’s tavern, then being distracted by a dog with a puffy tail). No. 3. “Me fail English? That’s unpossible.” – Ralph Wiggum That’s a solid list, especially if he was speaking off the cuff.
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 pointlessly about Marge’s Playboy cover (the quote from the book is in bold because WordPress won’t let me double quote something): Ortved quotes Brent Forrester, a writer and producer on the show, who identifies the episode as a turning point in the series’ history: The conventional wisdom is that the show changed after the monorail episode, written by Conan O’Brien. Conan’s monorail episode was surreal, and the jokes were so good that it became irresistible for all the other writers to write that kind of comedy. And that’s when the tone of the show really took a rapid shift in the direction of the surreal. Surreal is a good way to describe it. Mr. Burns inadvertently creates a radioactive squirrel, Principal Skinner is dismembered by the pincers of a giant, robotic ant, and an irascible Leonard Nimoy “beams” into the ether. These absurdities would come to define the show’s broader comedy, and reflect the persona that O’Brien would soon loose on the world. I’ve never thought of “Marge vs. the Monorail” as any kind of turning point. Granted I wasn’t working on the show, so maybe it felt like one from the inside. But looking at the finished products it’s sure hard to see it as one, especially for bending the laws of nature by having a radioactive squirrel with laser eyes (which is hilarious, by the way). In Season 3 a soap box derby racer goes so fast it glows from air resistance and then bursts into flames when it crashes. In Season 2 there’s a man sized catfish that isn’t radioactive and a three eyed fish that is. In Season 1 Homer is mistaken – by scientists – for Bigfoot. All of those things are at least as insane as Nimoy beaming up. Next is GQ which has a terrific list of five things it learned from the book. It’s worth reading, but two of them need some additional comment: 1. When George H.W. Bush slammed The Simpsons for being “anti-family values”—onstage at the 1992 Republican National Convention, no less—the show’s animators launched an internal “most immoral Simpsons scene” contest. The winning sequence: Grandpa having sex with the infant Maggie, Lisa breaking it up, and Grandpa savagely beating her to death with his cane. That’s right, Simpsons porn predates the internet. I rather like that. Also, is this really surprising? I mean, this was done in 1929 (supposedly…
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 the show so unmoored from its origins that even the most die-hard fans had trouble finding positive things to say. Whatever else we end up saying about this book, Ortved’s got his head in the right place. Zombie Simpsons is nothing if not “dispensable”, what a great way to phrase it.