“I can’t stand this any longer, somebody please pay attention to me!” – Bart Simpson Glyn Stott, he of the idiotic plan to watch all of The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons in a row, was interviewed by a radio show in Britain. After listening to it any reservations I had about criticizing this guy evaporated. There are two important parts. The first is the hilarity at the 3:00 minute mark when Generic UK DJ Guy asks him about “Cape Feare” and neither of them can remember the title of the Robert de Niro movie (which was itself a remake). I find this amusing because the title of the episode is, with the exception of the silent “e”, identical to the title of the film. Stott gets it eventually, but the fact that he can’t remember the title of one of the most famous episodes does not speak well for his legitimacy as a superfan. After that Generic UK DJ Guy asks him some triflingly easy questions (“What musical instrument does Lisa play?”) and then discusses his stupid plan. The second important part starts at about the 5:45 mark when we learn some interesting things. He’s been planning this for more than a year and he’s been trying to schedule it with some Guinness affiliated television show. But it doesn’t reach the pinnacle of dumbassery until about the 6:45 mark when he says this: “And since then it’s been one poor man in America trying to convert the old video tapes, twenty years worth of video tapes, over to DVD for me. So my heart goes out to him at the moment but I know they’ve been working very very hard and trying to get this challenge done completely. And it’d be a good milestone as well for the 20th anniversary.” Face palmingly obvious problems here: 65% of the 20 completed seasons (1-12, 20) are already available on DVD. All other episodes are available to anyone with an internet connection via BitTorrent. Morgan Spurlock, very recently and very publicly, watched every episode. He didn’t do it in one sitting, but neither was he under the impression that for him to do so there had to be some tragic soul sitting in a dismal editing bay copying shit from VHS. Glyn Stott is either a) really dumb, b) a desperate publicity whore, or c) both. Commence all appropriate internet mockery.
Tag: Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy
Too Cool for School
“Do not turn to another channel.” – Kent Brockman Herein I disagree with Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times: With the show now in its 21st season, it has become fashionable for bloggers to grouse that “The Simpsons” used to be a lot funnier a decade ago and boast that they’ve stopped watching new episodes. (She goes on to cite the same Zombie Simpsons writer we mentioned earlier.) First of all, and Dave and Mad Jon will back me up on this, I have never done anything “fashionable” in my life. They don’t call me “sweatpants” for nothing and while I realize that’s a slightly different meaning of the word “fashion” it still applies here. I don’t think anyone who can see Zombie Simpsons for the garbage it is does so in an attempt to be cool. If anything the popular sentiment goes the other way (ours is a culture that birthed the concept of “haterz”, after all). Criticizing Zombie Simpsons is not an effective way to get people to like you. Secondly, “boast that they’ve stopped watching new episodes” is a gross misuse of the word “boast”. Pride is the last thing I felt when I gave up on the show those many years ago. Regret, pain, and sadness, those were the emotions I felt. “Boasting” that I don’t like Zombie Simpsons makes as much sense as “boasting” about an airplane crash. The death of The Simpsons was the greatest pop culture loss of my adult life. It was a tragedy and treating it as such is simply appropriate. Finally, Spurlock was doing promotional stuff on the New York FOX affiliate the other day. There’s video at this link. It’s very meh. But towards the end the station babe who’s interviewing him asks about those “critics” who say the show isn’t as funny as it once was. (Predictably Spurlock trots out the quote from Warburton, that is easily going to be my least favorite part of the special). But what’s telling about this is that she’s a FOX employee discussing Simpsons and she deliberately brought up the decline of the show so it could be refuted. FOX knows that almost no one thinks the show is as good as it once was, but they won’t permit even the tiniest bit of dissent to creep into the official line. We shouldn’t have called it Zombie Simpsons, we should have called it Potemkin Simpsons.
Compare & Contrast: Car Humor
After we sat through Sunday’s “Rednecks and Broomsticks” Dave and I cleared our heads with some regular Simpsons. We decided that we should watch a good Lisa episode to cancel out the bad one so we threw on “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey”. It didn’t occur to me before we picked it but both of these episodes have extended scenes with the family in the car. In the Zombie Simpsons scene the only thing that happens for almost a minute is the kids playing the “Bonk It” game. It goes on and on (and on and on) and there are less than forty words of dialogue the entire time. In fact, here they are (not counting the game): Homer: I can’t take it anymore! Other Dad: I can’t take it anymore! Homer: D’oh! Marge: Oh darn, the batteries are dead. Bart: Not to worry, it plugs into the cigarette lighter. Homer: Hey kids, it’s daddy’s turn! Stomp it! Crush it! Kill it! That’s it. The whole scene takes almost a minute and there’s nothing else even attempting to be funny. This is the entire scene on a loop, it just looks like a freeze frame. Contrast that with the car ride home from the mall in “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy”. I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing, but it takes almost exactly the same amount of time as the interminable “Bonk It” scene and the following happens: Homer endangers his family (and ignores his wife) by buttering a muffin he made with the EZ Bake oven he bought for his car Grandpa gets nervous around Bart’s toy because his “skull is eggshell thin” Grandpa accidentally launches a missile from Sgt. Thug’s Mountaintop Command Post that causes a giant off screen explosion (which Bart thinks is cool) Lisa thanks Grandpa for the presents only to have him complain that they bought lousy stuff (he thinks they should’ve gotten something useful e.g. “a nice pipe organ”) Grandpa then goes on one of his awesomely bizarre rants and mentions: things smelling like mustard, all the ugly people he sees, his glaucoma, and the fact that the the President is a “Demi-crat” After the family cold-heartedly abandons their elderly relative in a car he gets stuck because he can’t unbuckle his seatbelt. All of the above was done in the same amount of time that Zombie Simpsons did “Bonk It”. This is why Zombie Simpsons is thinner than Dickensian gruel. Where once they were thinking “How many jokes can we cram in?”, now it’s “How much longer can we stretch this?”
Friday Link Dump – Losing the Signal Edition
“Come in. Come in! Mayday! I’m losing your transmission!” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson Comic-con was last week and as a result there was lots of news about the next season of Zombie Simpsons. Judging by the content of my inbox and search engines, two things are apparent: Coldplay is very popular (they are going to guest voice on Zombie Simpsons) and Canadians like curling (there is going to be a curling episode to coincide with the Vancouver Olympics). Adding to the confusion is a third story, the one about Obama having a beer with the cop and the professor, and anytime beer comes up in public a lot of lazy writers are going to invoke Homer Simpson. It’s like an iron law of nature. (This works for donuts as well.) Between those three things, Coldplay on the Simpsons, curling on the Simpsons, and beer in the White House, the background noise of “Simpsons” on the internet was pretty loud this week, hence a short link dump. There are several links with weird images on them, some excellent usage and two links about the Los Angeles Dodgers, one a completely stupid YouTube video. Enjoy. Krusty the Klown Fireworks Ad – It’s pretty much what it says and it’s just flat out bizarre. Che Guevara as Homer Simpson – Or is it Homer Simpson as Che Guevara? Click for a great picture. Get Your Own Ill-Gotten Gains At PropertyRoom.com – Consumerist had a piece on a website where you can buy seized crap and quoted Homer and Marge at the police auction. Excellent usage, though one does weep for what’s left of the Fourth Amendment. ‘SIMPSONS’ NEWS FROM COMIC-CON – Click for creepy Zombie Simpsons picture. That’s not quite what I see when I watch Zombie Simpsons, but it’s in the ballpark. Pricey bridge isn’t worth it – Calgary released plans for a “Peace Bridge”. Why Calgary, a city in the middle of one of the largest countries on earth, would need such a thing is the question on many a Canadian’s mind because it isn’t going to be cheap. That lead Dave Breakenridge of the Calgary Sun to break out his Simpsons: There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart Simpson steals Homer’s wallet and uses pop’s credit card to blow $350 on what he believes will be an intricate hand-drawn animation cel from his favourite cartoon Itchy and Scratchy. When it arrives in the mail, the cel contains nothing more than a barely recognizable arm. Homer’s credit card is dinged for $350 and Bart is stuck with something that is nothing more than a great disappointment. For some reason, that came to mind yesterday when the city finally unveiled the plans for the Santiago Calatrava-designed Peace Bridge. The unveiling is the definition of anti-climactic, or, to carry on the Simpsons’ analogies, the definition of “meh.” There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart Simpson steals Homer’s wallet and uses pop’s credit card to blow $350 on what he believes will…
Zombie Simpsons and Zombie Doris
“I can feel death’s clammy hand on my shoulder! Wait, that’s my hand.” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson This list is a pretty impressive display of Simpsons trivia. It’s real deaths of real people that changed the way The Simpsons went. Doris Grau and Phil Hartman I knew about, but the other four were news to me. Go read the whole thing, it’s quite good. This deserves special notice as a further illustration of how horrifyingly soulless Zombie Simpsons truly is: Doris Grau died from lung cancer (who could have guessed?) on December 30, 1995, a scant eight days before the aforementioned “Team Homer” aired. The episode was dedicated to her memory and the character of Lunchlady Doris was retired out of respect…until 2006, when “The Simpsons” was so desperate to be good again they let Tress MacNeille take a crack at Doris’s smokey voice. Zombie Simpsons brought back Lunchlady Doris in 2006? They are fucking evil, no two ways about it. Everyone should love Doris Grau. In addition to Lunchlady Doris she also voiced regular Doris on The Critic and was one of the nice old Jewish ladies who ran Eddie Murphy for Congress in The Distinguished Gentlemen: (Skip to the 6:20 mark and you can see her make an Alzheimer’s joke and scold Murphy in Yiddish.)
Quote of the Day
“Hello Smithers. You’re quite good at turning me on.” – Electronic Mr. Burns “Um… you probably should ignore that.” – Waylon Smithers
Oh look, they weren’t lying
“I’d be mortified if someone ever made a lousy product with the ‘Simpson’ name on it.” – Lisa Simpson Lo and behold! The United States Postal Service and Fox have unveiled the stamps they hinted at not one week ago, featuring oddly stylized artwork of America’s favorite funny family. You’re encouraged to vote “early and often” for your favorite stamp online, though curiously “none of the above” is not an option. Oh well. These sticky little fuckers and related ephemera go on sale May 7th. We won’t be buying any, because we can’t condone anything related to celebrating 20 years of the show when Zombie Simpsons is still on the air. That and we hate mail.
Quote of the Day
“We need some more secret sauce, put this mayonnaise in the sun.” – Old Man Peterson, Krusty Burger Manager