“Don’t worry, baby, the tube’ll know what to do.” – Homer Simpson I’ve never worked as an animator, nor even been able to draw decently, so feel free to take the following with a grain of salt. Having said that, I’ve sat through every single one of the HD episodes of Zombie Simpsons, and I think all their digital tools have made it increasingly easy for them to cut corners. Take the image below from “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing”: There’s nothing terribly remarkable, it’s just an establishing shot of the school. (You can see Bart’s stupid tractor ride starting in the lower left corner.) Compare it to basically the same shot from “The Last Temptation of Homer”: The things I’m about to point out aren’t a big deal, and my ignorance of the working trade of animation may make the next few dozen sentences completely worthless, but to my eye the hand drawn one looks like it had a lot more care put into it. Specifically, there are three items I noticed upon close inspection: the windows, the flag pole, and the sidewalks. In the Season 22 image, the little bend marks in the windows are barely visible, but the ones you can make out all look the same: two parallel lines of slightly lighter blue to give the glass panes a little more substance than if they were monochrome. In the one from Season 5, the lines in the windows are black (making them much more visible), and no two are the same. The different windows give the drawing a less generic feel, making it easier for you to imagine that each window conceals an actual room. After all, real window panes aren’t perfectly uniform; from the day they’re cut they get scuffed and scratched in different ways. The Zombie Simpsons windows are so perfectly alike that it subtracts the feeling of life from the image, whereas the windows in The Simpsons were all clearly done one by one, giving them a unique feel that makes the whole thing look more like a real building, even if the lines aren’t aligned down to the millimeter. Now look at the flag poles. On the digital one, the flag pole is utterly boring. It’s just two precisely parallel lines that someone has used a fill command to make grey. The hand drawn one has a lot more personality. It doesn’t just disappear into a tuft of grass; it has a base so you can actually see what’s holding it steady. Moreover, the pole itself appears to taper toward the top the way real flag poles do. Someone took the time to draw and inspect it, instead of just plopping it down with a couple of clicks. It’s the sidewalks are where you can really see the difference though. Because while both sidewalks contain mistakes, they are of a vastly different character. I’ve circled portions of each above. First, consider the one from Zombie Simpsons and note the perpendicular lines…
Tag: Love Is A Many Strangled Thing
Crazy Noises: Love Is a Many Strangled Thing
“And that horrible act of child abuse became one of our most beloved running gags.” – Homer Simpson In our ongoing mission to bring you only the shallowest and laziest analysis of Zombie Simpsons, we’re keeping up our Crazy Noises series for Season 22. Since a podcast is so 2004, and video would require a flag, a fern and some folding chairs from the garage, we’ve elected to use the technology that brought the word “emoticon” to the masses: the chatroom. Star Trek image macros are strictly forbidden, unless you have a really good reason why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “engendered”). There was plenty to complain about this week, but despite our relatively far ranging discussion there was something that really bothered me that we didn’t discuss. Homer choking Bart has always only really worked because the show was a cartoon. When the audience is made to contemplate what’s actually happening, all the fun gets sucked out of it because crushing the air out of child is sickening to contemplate. That alone drained out whatever microscopic mirth existed in a number of scenes in “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing”, including the one where the therapist and the other dads act mortified at Homer. But right after making things serious, we get another case of Zombie Simpsons wanting to have its cake and eat it too. If strangulation is so terrible, why should we enjoy seeing it happen to Homer, first at the hands of all those big dudes and then from a noose? They want us to think it’s ghastly for one scene, but then take everything lightly for the rest of the episode. [Note: No Dave again this week.] Charlie Sweatpants: Anyway, shall we get started? Mad Jon: Let’s get started. Charlie Sweatpants: I’ll say off the bat that I didn’t hate the couch gag. It didn’t take long, and I will always have a nerd’s love of anything that even resembles ASCII humor. Mad Jon: I agree, it was short and couch gag-y. Those don’t have to be out of the park, it is a simple bit. Charlie Sweatpants: Now that that pleasantness is behind us forever, the rest of the episode was atrocious. Mad Jon: Yes, almost immediately, starting with Burns running his balloon into a cathedral. Repeat, a cathedral. Charlie Sweatpants: Oh, I know. There are a lot of ugly things on Zombie Simpsons, but there are few worse endemic problems than incompetent Mr. Burns. Turning Burns into this hapless waste instead of the pure evil he used to be still grates after all these years. Mad Jon: A French speaking, incompetent Burns at that. Also an elk or a moose or something got to escape from Lenny’s car, maybe. Charlie Sweatpants: And then Homer had to shoot down the balloon because Carl was crippled by drive by exposition. Mad Jon: And so forth. It’s just another case of…
Compare & Contrast: Big Screens and Ballgames
“Homer! Homer! X-Y-Z.” – Marge Simpson “Examine my zipper, why? Whoops.” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons is nothing if not a heartless and brainless imitation of The Simpsons. Unfortunately for those charged with doing the imitating, the real thing left very few topics uncovered during its run. Consequently, Zombie Simpsons is forced to dig up old ideas, slap a more modern theme on them, and pretend that they’ve done something new. This happens in ways small and large. For a small one, look at the awkward way “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing” dredged up Bart’s crank calls to Moe. Times have changed and crank calling doesn’t really exist anymore, but that didn’t stop Zombie Simpsons from haphazardly trying to cram its bloated, rotting foot into the glass slipper. Not only would Moe be able to instantly identify Bart as the sender (as anyone who’s ever used a cell phone knows), but why does he read it aloud? When it was a phone call looking for someone at the bar, he called out the name like a person in his position ordinarily would. Now that it’s a text message, there’s no reason for him to say it out loud, even if it had been a mildly plausible fake name. The scene was just Moe saying “I. M. A. Wiener” as though he was reading from a cue card. “Mike Rotch”, “Jacques Strap”, “Seymour Butz”, the whole gag is that these are names that are actually jokes. What’s “I. M. A. Wiener”? Not a single part of this works. It’s like that kid from grade school who told a joke and got a laugh, and then kept telling the same joke long after everyone else had moved on. For a larger example, we turn to family sports outings. In both “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing” and “Dancin’ Homer”, the family Simpson takes a trip to a ball game courtesy of Charles Montgomery Burns. The differences start to pile up before the family even arrives at the stadium. In “Dancin’ Homer”, we hear that the family is there because it was “Nuclear Plant Employees, Spouses, and No More Than Three Children Night”. This setup takes just a couple of seconds, is perfectly consistent with Homer’s role in life as a faceless blue-collar slug, and even sneaks in a joke about how cheap Mr. Burns is, all in a single line of dialogue. (And it’s immediately followed by Otto’s fantastic two birds with one stone line.) Zombie Simpsons is incapable of such a quick and well crafted opening. Instead it serves up more than two minutes of Burns and Smithers in an old time hot air balloon, all the plant employees just hanging out in the parking lot (with rifles), a cathedral that materializes out of nowhere and then vanishes just as suddenly, and Burns personally rewarding Homer. It’s everything The Simpsons never was: overwrought, drawn out, illogical, you name it. Things get worse when Zombie Simpsons finally gets to the stadium. …
Use It or Lose It
“There’s something I used to do in this situation, but . . . can’t . . . remember.” – Bart Simpson “Ha-ho?” – Nelson Muntz Atrophy is a merciless bitch. Similar to entropy, it’s the rule that says every living thing, from people to protists, have to keep doing stuff to avoid becoming dead. If you stop using your legs, because of laziness or injury, pretty soon they’ll wither to nothing. Ask anybody who’s ever had to wear a cast about how quickly debilitation sets in. The same principle applies to creative endeavors like television shows. If you stop doing something, pretty soon you lose that ability. I think this is basically what happened to Zombie Simpsons over the last decade. The show kept doing less and less and gradually came to the state it’s in now where it’s only really capable of two things: hurting Homer and celebrity guests (often as themselves). Everything else has been ignored for so long that they’ve lost the capacity to do things like tell a story or introduce characters to a scene. Take the scene at the school in “Love Is A Many Strangled Thing”. First, Bart rides a tractor into the school, which is itself stupid and nonsensical. Just because Homer’s letting Bart do whatever he wants doesn’t mean that Skinner and Krabappel would be similarly constrained. But things get worse immediately as first Homer and then Chief Wiggum appear at the school. Why are they there? How did they get there? This isn’t something most shows have trouble doing. If a character is going to be in a scene, s/he is either introduced by walking in and saying hello or it’s someplace we expect them to be naturally. But neither Homer nor Wiggum resides or works at the school, nor is any story reason given why they should be there. Zombie Simpsons stopped caring about the integrity of its scenes, and now they’re unable to create scenes that make sense. Stretched over an entire episode this leads to things like that mysteriously appearing and disappearing cathedral at the beginning, Lisa and Marge’s bizarre horse movie scene, and the hapless video chat with Jimbo and Kearney. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are as bad as usual. A mere 6.14 million people forgot how to use their remote controls last night. That’s the third lowest all season, but it isn’t quite low enough to drag Season 22 below Season 20’s average. Oh well.
Sunday Preview: “Love Is A Many Strangled Thing”
Dave’s on the road today, but he took the time to improve the promotional image for tonight’s disgrace. Courtesy of Simpsons Channel, the wretchedly auto-erotic company line: When Homer inadvertently humiliates Bart in front of a stadium crowd, Marge encourages Homer to enroll in a fathering enrichment class taught by therapist Dr. Zander (guest voice Paul Rudd). Shocked to learn that Homer often strangles Bart for mischievous behavior, Dr. Zander conducts a series of treatments with the help of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (guest-voicing as himself) to teach Homer what it feels like to be young and small. “But when Bart learns that the therapy sessions have transformed Homer into a pushover, he takes advantage of Homer and becomes a school bully. Hoping therapy could also cure Bart of his bullying habits, Marge enlists Dr. Zander’s help to patch their relationship.” That is an awful lot of words to convey the same impression made by a single one: crappy. I suggest we all agree to remember non-basketball Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for his contribution to Airplane!: