“Samantha!” – Mr. Stanky “Dad!” – Samantha Stanky “Noooooo!” – Mr. Stanky As far as nothingburger girlfriend characters go, Kumiko is so empty that she makes the relatively one-dimensional Rene from Season 9 look like Katniss Everdeen. Rene at least talked to Moe before dating him out of pity. Kumiko apparently fell in love with Comic Book Guy without even so much as meeting him. But even that vacuous characterization is rich and deep compared to Kumiko’s father, who shows up out of the blue and instantly becomes the focus of the episode despite failing, after his very first scene, to do what he said he was there to do. And, of course, per standard Zombie Simpsons operating procedure, he doesn’t get a name. Back in Season 3, the show gave us another father who didn’t want his daughter dating one of Springfield’s losers. He also didn’t get a first name, but in that case it didn’t matter because by the time he was on screen for his one scene, he’d already been a shadow over their doomed romance from the beginning of the episode. I speak, of course, of Samantha Stanky’s father, Mr. Stanky, in “Bart’s Friend Falls In Love”. To understand how The Simpsons could make a better character despite his having only one scene on screen and just four lines, it helps to look side-by-side at how and when each of them is introduced and expanded. Mr. Stanky (which is hard to type without giggling a bit) is mentioned for the first time in the middle of the first act, just three minutes into the episode, when Samantha, forced by Mrs. Krabappel to introduce herself in front of the class while being graded on grammar and poise, says: We just moved here from Phoenix. My dad owns a home security company. He came to Springfield because of its high crime rate and lackluster police force. Right there, with the man himself most of the episode away from even being seen, we can form a mental picture of the guy. He owns a security company, and he’s willing to uproot his family and move across the country to a city with lots of crime because of it. We know right away that he’s not a sentimentalist and probably isn’t someone you’d want to screw around with. By contrast, Kumiko’s father doesn’t show up until twelve minutes into the episode, at what I guess is supposed to be the first or second act break (Zombie Simpsons makes it hard to tell). Up to this point we hadn’t heard of him at all. He didn’t rate so much as a toss off line from Kumiko or Comic Book Guy about her father maybe not wanting his daughter pulling up stakes and moving to America to live with some dude he’s never met. They had eight minutes left to fill, so you knew something had to keep the new lovers from riding off happily into the sunset, but the episode is so…
Tag: Married To The Blob
Behind Us Forever: Married To The Blob
"Tell me, how do you feel about forty-five year old virgins who still live with their parents?" – Comic Book Guy "Comb the SweetTarts out of your beard and you’re on." – Comic Babe "Don’t try to change me, baby." – Comic Book Guy [Note: Sorry for the extremely late posting on this one. That kind of week. Compare & Contrast should be along tomorrow.] Over the last ten years or so, Hollywood has become extremely adept at giving "geeks" (for lack of a better term) what they want. The most visible expression of this is the way that comic book movies have come to be routine fixtures in each year’s list of box office champions, but down on the small screen things have been going along just as well. Between the Battlestar Galactica remake, yet more comic book properties, the uneven but occasionally glorious return of Futurama, and plenty more, there is stuff beyond Star Trek that your stereotypical fat guy geek can love. Over that same span of time, The Simpsons went from one of the most beloved things on television to the pale imitation of itself that exists today, something so cluelessly mediocre that pretty much nobody outside of the entertainment industry and its various paid shills will say anything good about it in public. "Married to the Blob" is like a tiny microcosm of that, with the once razor sharp satire of Comic Book Guy getting the full Moe treatment of lovesick lonely heart before falling ass backwards into a one-dimensional wish fulfillment girlfriend who is, wait for it, a hot, Asian manga artist. I guess there’s something to be said for the completeness of that collapse into hapless pandering, but it sure doesn’t make for entertaining television. – Once again, the couch gag goes on for a very long time and is possibly the most creative part of the episode. – This Radioactive Man movie/show/comic-imagining/whatever it’s supposed to be would have worked better without each character explaining themselves, sometimes twice. – Lisa just walked in from nowhere to tell us what’s about to happen . . . and now it’s happening. – A pointless, self voiced celebrity. Thanks, Mr. Ellison. No, there won’t be a check in the mail. – So this other comic book guy, whom they had to remind us who he is, just barged in front of Homer in line to exposit and get the plot started and brag about being married. I don’t think it would kill them to have at least one scene make sense, but they seem to think it would. – And now Homer’s impatient at being made to wait. He wasn’t for the minute it took them to have rival comic book guy appear and disappear, but the show conveniently forgot he was there for that stretch of time. Infants have a better sense of object permanence than Zombie Simpsons, and it’s not even close. – Well, give them this, they know their songs suck even if…
Sunday Preview: Married To The Blob
Homer offers dating advice to Comic Book Guy when he meets a Japanese manga author who catches his fancy. Oh CBG, how I miss you, and how I loathe what you have become. From what I’ve read they unfroze Stan Lee to say a few lines, and although that isn’t a new thing for Zombie Simpsons, I think it has at least been a while.