“Lisa, get away from that jazz man!” – Marge Simpson “But, Mom! Can’t I stay a little longer?” – Lisa Simpson “Come on, come on, we were worried about you. Nothing personal, I just fear the unfamiliar.” – Marge Simpson Happy 30th anniversary to “Moaning Lisa”!
Tag: Moaning Lisa
Quote of the Day
“That was beautiful. What’s it called?” – Lisa Simpson “Oh, it’s a little tune that I call The I Never Had An Italian Soup Blues.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy Happy Birthday, Mike Reiss!
Behind Us Forever: Springfield Splendor
“She doesn’t look sad. I don’t see any tears in her eyes.” – Homer Simpson “It’s not that kind of sad. I’m sorry, Dad, but you wouldn’t understand.” – Lisa After last week’s little experiment, it’s back to regular Zombie Simpsons this week, including plots that don’t make sense, two clock eating montages, several unnecessarily self-voiced celebrities, the standard hacktacular ending, and plenty of characters telling us exactly how they’re feeling. As a sort of bonus, some of this week’s exposition is written down rather than spoken. The story here is – and stop me if you’ve seen this one a dozen times before – Lisa is sad. She goes to a therapist who tells her to do “art therapy”, which turns into a comic book that she writes and Marge draws, which turns into a Broadway musical, which turns (at long last) into the end credits. There isn’t really a b-plot this week, so they tossed in some random scenes of Bart and Homer doing brief sketch pieces. – No couch gag or title sequence, which means this one ran long, which is not a good sign, especially when the opening is Lisa having a dream that she narrates to us. – Waking up, Lisa runs into Homer and Marge’s room where, in the span of just thirty seconds, they manage to do the “Homer wakes up instantly” joke twice. – The family ends up at Springfield community college so Lisa can get discount therapy. Since this episode is mostly filler, they encounter Lenny on the front steps: Lenny: I only paid a student dentist twelve dollars for this brand new crown. [He pulls out his tooth.] See? Marge: I don’t think it’s supposed to come out. Lenny: That’s why I paid a student para-legal to sue him. I lost! [He tosses the tooth aside and walks off.] After this scintillating exchange, Homer looks at the family, then smiles and nods vigorously. This is funny, but not for the reasons the show wants. – They walk by Dan Harmon teaching a class. He gets pelted with spitballs and falls down. This is the first of many useless self voiced celebrities. – Homer tosses Bart into a dog grooming class because, hey, that’s funny. – We finally get to the therapist, who is clearly pregnant but who also tells us she’s pregnant. I swear they sometimes read the stage directions out loud and nobody notices. – Effort alert: there are a couple of book titles in the counselor’s office, the only one of which I liked was “The Social Psychology of Student Loan Debt”. But, hey, they’re kinda trying. Right? – The Bart-as-dog thing is still going on as Lisa struggles to draw her feelings. Then Marge comes in and draws Lisa’s feeling for her. This leads to our first montage as Marge’s drawings of Lisa’s life are animated. This includes thought bubbles for this week’s distinguishing feature: written exposition. – Lisa goes back to the community college therapist to…
Cruelly Bleak Simpsons Lines
“I’m just wondering: what’s the point? Would it make any difference at all if I never existed? How can we sleep at night when there’s so much suffering in the world?” – Lisa Simpson “Well . . . uh . . . come on, Lisa! Ride the Homer horsey! Giddy-up, weeee!” – Homer Simpson The Simpsons always took a pretty dim view not just of human nature, but of human existence generally. Misdeeds are rarely punished, triumphs are rarely recognized, and justice is all but non-existent. After all, if there’s one thing Homer’s learned, it’s that life is one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead. So, in honor of Simpsons Day, here are some of the show’s most existentially bleak lines. This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, so feel free to suggest your own in the comments. “Please don’t make me retire. My job is the only thing that keeps me alive. I never married and my dog is dead.” We only ever see Jack Marley in “Marge Gets a Job”, and he breaks down sobbing at this short, horrifically bleak summary of his own life. Worst/funniest of all: later we see him not get his job back, which means that the reason we haven’t seen him again is probably because he died shortly thereafter. – “Sir, six cinder blocks are missing.” “There’ll be no hospital then. I’ll tell the children.” The children – presumably very sick ones – who’ve been waiting for a new hospital so they can get better, will now continue to suffer and die because Homer Simpson wanted a crappy bookshelf. Truly, fate is cruel. – “I’m trying to turn it off.” “No, bear want to live!” The first time I saw Rick & Morty‘s ultra-depressing butter robot, I thought of Frink’s doomed bear. It’s a sentient being staring into an unanswerable existential crises because it was somebody’s side project. At least the robots in Westworld are magnificent masterpieces, the bear and the butter robot are hopeless. – “I used to be with it, then they changed what it was. Not what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you.” Even youth cannot protect you from obsolescence and death. There’s a reason I see this line quoted all the time as one of the show’s best: it’s depressing when you’re a kid, and it just gets worse with each passing year. – “Most of you will never fall in love and marry out of fear of dying alone.” Happiness is only ever attained by a few people, and certainly not by you. Congratulations on your nuptials. – “I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn’t.” Your beliefs and activism are probably futile, and even if you succeed it won’t have the effect you wanted. Vote Trump. – “Before we sit down to our delicious turkey puree, I have some happy news. The following…
Reading Digest: Moaning Lisa Has Aged Very Well Edition
“Just take mine. A simple cupcake will bring me no pleasure.” – Lisa Simpson This week we’ve got two links hearkening back to Season 1’s melancholy masterpiece “Moaning Lisa”, and two different fond remembrances of the first time someone ever watched the show. Season 1 often gets overlooked for the very understandable reasons that it both looks and sounds quite different than it would even in Season 2, but those episodes still resonate with people, and that’s astonishing. In addition to that, we’ve got a great Spider-Man put down, new old bootleg Bart, some .gifs, and a horrifying soccer mascot. Enjoy. Tom Holland is Spider-Man’s New “Hat” At A Time When I Wanted a Lisa Lionheart – Excellent usage: The makers of Malibu Stacy, the Simpsons stand-in for Barbie, respond with an all-night brainstorming session where it is decided to release a Malibu Stacy which is exactly the same but has a new hat. A River of Melted Hot Butter – This is a transcript of a diary from when the author was a kid, and this is great: After dinner we went to ACE and got some candy. I got some gum. It was so good. I’m chewing the gum right now. I am also watching The Simpsons. It is my favorite episode. At 7:00, Jamie is coming to spend the night. Anyway, it’s almost seven and she’s going to miss The Simpsons. That’s okay, she saw it when she came over today. But what episode is it?? Three Men And A Comic Book – This is true: -Wow, they got away with Homer saying “T.S.” on prime-time television, in the early 90s. Sure, it was just an acronym, but it was still pretty bold for the time. Also, too, I was about the only kid I knew who hated The Wonder Years, so I’ve always loved when Homer keeps interrupting Bart’s narrative staring. Sex and The Simpsons – And none of the examples are from Zombie Simpsons, hooray. Also, there’s a .gif of Homer in the Mr. Plow jacket. The Shearer Situation: An Overview – Our old friend Noah takes a look at the why of Shearer’s departure: So, why would he leave then? Well, these seem to be the three prevailing theories: Be Street – Bootleg Bart Creative Contest – Modern takes on classic Bart. Notorious B.A.R.T. is great. Hank Azaria on Harry Shearer’s Simpsons Dispute – No real news here, but at least Azaria’s got a sense of humor about it: Azaria, who conceded, “If he really doesn’t come back, the show has to continue in some way at least for a while … Maybe we’ll do a YouTube thing, like how they found that Asian guy that sings for Journey.” LISTEN: The Simpsons ‘Moaning Lisa’ Review – Just what it says. I love that episode. Caitlyn Jenner is given The Simpsons treatment with her Vanity Fair cover – That same Italian artists strikes again. Is Pixar’s Inside Out Just a Herman’s Head Rip-Off? – Excellent usage: Oh, really, Pixar, you’re going inside the mind of an…
Permanent Record: Mr. Largo
“Alright, class, from the top: one and two and three and. . .” – Mr. Largo American primary schools are filled with godawful bands. While a few students might genuinely like playing music and even have some skill, most of the members are kids that have no particular aptitude for music, aren’t overly fond of their instruments, and/or are only in the band because their parents made them join. In this context, “band” is just another class or after school activity, something most of the kids will go through the motions for, if only to keep the adults off their backs. At the head of this artistically doomed enterprise is the music teacher, someone who has, for whatever reason, ended up teaching on the lowest rung of musical education. Mr. Largo perfectly exemplifies every bad stereotype there is about school music teachers. He’s an authoritarian, he long ago lost whatever passion he had for music or his work, and, as Lisa would reveal in Season 2, his most profound lesson to probably his best student was that “even the noblest concerto can be drained of its beauty and soul”. We can see all of these traits in Largo’s brief two scenes in “Moaning Lisa”. In the first, at band practice, he not only lashes out at Lisa for not playing along dully like the rest of the students, but evinces not a whit of empathy for her or the hardscrabble Americans she invokes as her justification for straying from the sheet music. All he cares about is making those kids play “My Country Tis of Thee”, and if their rendition is off key, off rhythm and only barely recognizable as the song they’re trying to play, well, he doesn’t care about that. In his second appearance, just after Marge has given Lisa her terrible advice about smiling no matter what, he point blank tells Lisa that he doesn’t want any more “creativity” from her. For Largo, music isn’t about being creative, it’s about muddling through with strict adherence to the original, however inadequate or terrible sounding. As a character, and despite his inclusion in the opening credits, Largo never developed into a standby the way many other Season 1 creations did. He didn’t become Lisa’s foil the way Krabappel and Skinner were Bart’s, and except for background shots he rarely appeared outside of the school. But as with so many other characters, Largo didn’t need a great deal of backstory or his own star turn in an episode to make him seem like a real person. He was a music teacher who, by temperament, talent and good, old fashioned apathy, was cut out to be little else. He didn’t really like his job or his students, and that made him a perfect fit in Springfield and at Springfield Elementary.
Quote of the Day
“My friends call me Bleeding Gums.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy “Eww, how’d you get a name like that?” – Lisa Simpson “Well, lemme put it this way, you ever been to the dentist?” – Bleeding Gums Murphy “Yeah.” – Lisa Simpson “Not me. I suppose I should go to one, but I got enough pain in my life as it is.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy
Compare & Contrast: Existential Crises in Childhood
“I’m still trying to figure out what’s bothering Lisa. I don’t know, Bart’s such a handful, and Maggie needs attention, but all the while, our little Lisa’s becoming a young woman.” – Marge Simpson “Oh, so that’s it. This is some kind of underwear thing.” – Homer Simpson Beneath the unvarnished cruise line agitprop, the hastily dropped money saving plot, and that bizarre encounter with penguins in Ant-fucking-arctica lies what may be the most half-assed aspect of “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again”, its blisteringly simplistic and incomplete handling of Bart’s serious melancholy. Though the episode doesn’t really get around to what Bart’s actually feeling until past its midpoint, the Bart we see here is floundering among the deep and unanswerable questions of life. Is this all there is? What should I be doing with my life? Since Zombie Simpsons always – always – follows in the footsteps of The Simpsons, it’s worth looking at the first time the show handled a youthful crisis of self doubt and existential dread, Season 1’s “Moaning Lisa”. The driving idea of “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again” is Bart’s unhappiness, his belief that because he doesn’t have enough “fun”, his life is a total waste. To its surprising credit, Zombie Simpsons actually portrays this rather grimly, by having Bart imagine himself on his death bed, looking back on a life wasted at school and work, the only real accomplishment of which was to produce a son capable of wheeling him into the hospital to die. It’s more bleak than funny, but I’m almost impressed. Of course, being Zombie Simpsons, they viciously undercut this rather depressing concept in a number of ways. Not only do they place it right after their pathetic song-vertisement, but they actually have Bart say out loud exactly what he’s feeling three (3!) times in succession. First, young Bart laments that vacation will end and fun with it. Then old Bart says the same thing. Then they cut back to young Bart who repeats it again. You can make a case for the third one, because it does have Bart resolving to keep the cruise going forever, but the first two are 100% unnecessary filler. Being aware of how full frontally bad your writing is doesn’t make it okay. As poorly and as late in the episode as Zombie Simpsons is presenting it, however, this is some heavy shit Bart is dealing with. (And no, the montage at the beginning doesn’t count, even as foreshadowing. It’s fluff that gets discarded as soon as the cruise commercial comes on.) Even though he’s only kinda sorta still a kid, to have a ten-year-old imagine his unhappy death is both sad and morbid. It’s a meaty enough concept that you could, were you so inclined, base a decent episode around it. Now that’s foreshadowing. Naturally, “Moaning Lisa” is better than just “decent”, and that’s due in no small part to the fact that it takes…
Quote of the Day
“You know, Marge, getting old is a terrible thing. I think the saddest day of my life was when I realized I could beat my dad at most things, and Bart experienced that at the age of four.” – Homer Simpson
Crazy Noises: Elementary School Musical
“Now, Miss Simpson, I hope we won’t have a repeat of yesterday’s outburst of unbridled creativity.” – Mr. Largo “No, sir.” – Lisa Simpson There are two horrible, glaring problems with this episode that we didn’t cover at all in the discussion below. The first is that while the Conchords provide what little levity this episode has, they also make no sense, and that’s before they fly off the roof at the end. (Lucy Lawless did that, let me check, eleven seasons ago . . . in a Halloween episode. Bravo for originality.) The idea is that they’re poor artists, fine; but aren’t they also camp counselors? Maybe they made an aside about how that’s their other job or it doesn’t pay the bills or something and I missed it (and there’s no way I’m watching it again to check), but I don’t think so. Once again, plot problems that could be solved by the insertion of a joke or a quick aside are simply ignored because they just don’t care. The second massive problem here is the numerous missed comedy opportunities that demonstrate just how little they’re really trying. They go to all that trouble to pack Krusty’s trial with as many European stereotypes as possible, and then when they show him in prison it’s not some nice, cushy Euro-jail, it’s a boring old regular prison yard. (The fact that it took them about a minute to make a DVD region joke didn’t help either.) They bothered to create an arts camp, and then did basically nothing with it. There isn’t all that much of the real Brooklyn left that looks like Not Brooklyn, but instead of satirizing gentrifying artsy types, they went with the thirty-year-old ghetto stereotype and even dropped that pretty quick. It’s almost like they think developing ideas is beneath them. Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we get on with it? Mad Jon: Sure. Do either of you or have either of you ever watched Glee? I have not and have no idea about the show. Dave: I’ve not watched it; I’ve heard enough about it to know I’d hate it. Charlie Sweatpants: I also have not watched it, so I don’t really have an opinion. But the Glee kids were hardly in this episode. Like most of the non-Simon Cowell judges from the American Idol episode, they were here for the briefest of cameos and then they vanished. Mad Jon: So the ‘artists’ weren’t glee cast members? Dave: They played some of the other campers I think. Mad Jon: Ahh. Dave: The whole episode felt like a bad Flight of the Conchords episode. Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, they were those other kids. I was never a big Conchords fan for the simple reason that it always felt very hit and miss. A lot of the time you’d be bored for eighteen of the twenty two minutes. Those other four minutes could be hilarious, but they were capable of missing entirely, which they surely did here. Dave: Fair…
Quote of the Day
“Lisa . . . Lisa Simpson! Lisa, there’s no room for crazy bebop in ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’.” – Mr. Largo “But Mr. Largo, that’s what my country’s all about.” – Lisa Simpson “What?” – Mr. Largo “I’m wailing out for the homeless family living out of its car. The Iowa farmer whose land has been taken away by unfeeling bureaucrats. The West Virginia coal miner coughing up-” – Lisa Simpson “That’s all fine and good, but Lisa, none of those unpleasant people are going to be at the recital next week.” – Mr. Largo Happy 20th Anniversary to “Moaning Lisa”!
Quote of the Day
“You know, you play pretty well for someone with no real problems.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy “Yeah, but I don’t feel any better.” – Lisa Simpson “The blues isn’t about feeling better, it’s about making other people feel worse, and making a few bucks while you’re at it.” – Bleeding Gums Murphy
Citation Is Not Satire – Video Game Edition
“If I were you I really would use those quarters for laundry.” – Noiseland Video Arcade Guy The internet is filled with people who love television and video games, and so the brief Halo/teabagging bit from last Sunday’s Zombie Simpsons was mentioned in many places. I saw it on Joystiq first, but this description from Kotaku sums things up well: I guess we can move the trend marker for “Teabagging in Halo” on the downward trajectory of its lifespan, just to the right of the shark fin. That’s about right, by the time Zombie Simpsons gets around to mentioning something it’s usually well past its expiration date. But this also provides a good excuse to demonstrate the pervasive laziness of what passes for jokes on Zombie Simpsons. To illustrate just how flimsy Zombie Simpsons is we must look back to one of the thirteen underappreciated masterpieces of Season 1. In “Moaning Lisa” Homer and Bart play a boxing game against each other; last Sunday, Homer sat in his fantasy bachelor apartment playing a facsimile of Halo. Let’s compare and contrast. The boxing game in “Moaing Lisa” bears a vague resemblance to Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!, far and away the most famous video boxing game of the time. But instead of simply using the game as is, the show brought its own sensibilities to it, including graphically sophisticated cartoon violence that 1990 video games couldn’t actually do. Fast forward nineteen years and there’s no creativity whatsoever to the Halo clone in “Waverly Hills 9-0-2-1-D’oh”; it’s basically a straight copy and paste job (and it’s not the only one). The game in the episode appears more or less as it does on the XBox and the “joke”, such as there is one, is to simply show something you can do in the game. This is just another example of the collapse of humor the show has experienced over the years. Back then, it took a popularly understood video game concept, played with it a little to make it funnier, and worked it into the overall plot. Now, it takes a well understood concept, unmodified in any way and completely unrelated to anything else in the episode, and expects the audience to laugh simply because they recognize the reference. There’s no joke, there’s no satire, it’s just repetition. Finally, let me say one quick thing as a Halo player. I’ve been been teabagged on numerous occasions (often by opponents whose voices make it abundantly clear that their testicles have yet to descend, which makes it both weirder and funnier), and I’m not above the occasional teabagging myself. So take my word for it when I say that the refreshingly crude culture of on-line games like Halo, essentially a forum for the unrestrained id of the American male, is a very rich comedy vein (witness Red vs Blue). Zombie Simpsons didn’t even try to tap it.