“Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.” – Jasper (as read by Homer Simpson) Last month, when I was taking all those frame grabs of the seated Cerberus that was the three housewives from “Moms I’d Like to Forget”, I was struck by how modern and colorful their outfits were compared to Marge’s. The next week I noticed something similar in “Flaming Moe”. Characters who’ve been around a long time, like Smithers and Patty, look really out of place next to the one-and-done guests. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that this happens in almost every episode. They come up with some one off character or just have a celebrity on, and s/he looks wildly different than the long time characters in the same shot. This is another example of how you can’t keep the show from aging, even if you nominally keep the characters from aging. Characters that were originally designed to catch the eye in low definition at a time when televisions were a lot smaller don’t scale up well to HD resolutions. The basic character models (Marge’s green dress, Homer’s white shirt, etcetera) are big on solid colors and low on minute detail. But new characters, who are supposed to be twenty-first century Americans, can’t be drawn the way the Simpsons are, it would look terrible. Instead they animate new characters as realistically as possible and just ignore the clashing styles. Look at Patty’s clothes compared to the gay dudes. Her dress is flat and monochromatic, their clothes are colorful and detailed. Look at the shoulders, buttons and belt of the guy in white. Look at the knotted sweatshirt; look at the precise lines of the pockets on the green pants. The three of them are massively more detailed than she is. Here we can see the same thing with Marge and the Anitas. They gave Marge as many different dresses as they could (examples), but when they use her standard outfit they’re stuck with these radically clashing styles. The clothing is obvious enough, but it extends even to the accessories. Two of the Anitas are wearing necklaces that look kind of like the necklaces real women wear everyday. Next to those, Marge’s necklace is painfully cartoony. There’s nothing wrong with cartoony in and of itself, but it looks more than a little out of place next to the more realistic drawings. This sort of thing happens all the time on Zombie Simpsons, and it’s only gotten worse since the changeover to HD. Unfortunately for us, there’s nothing they can do about it even if they wanted to. The audience accepts Marge in that uniform green dress, but if you drew other characters with the same simplicity it would look childishly primitive. And it’s not like they can change the way the main characters look, doing so would risk a New Coke level disaster. They compensate by putting old characters in different clothes far more often than they did back in…
Tag: Moms I’d Like to Forget
Crazy Noises: Moms I’d Like to Forget
“That must be the happiest kid in the world.” – Bart 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 “chandelier”). There’s something unbelievably tepid about most Zombie Simpsons episodes, and “Moms I’d Like to Forget” shares that nervous attitude. It just seems more comfortable neutrally reflecting the world with yellow skin and bad overbites instead of actually making fun of something or someone. Consider that nasty, spoiled kid and his checked out mom in “Marge Be Not Proud” (which is not exactly my favorite episode). The kid in the toy store is really an asshole, and his mom not only doesn’t seem to care, but she looks plenty selfish and narcissistic herself, the kind of parent so self involved that she’s basically indifferent to her own kids. It is a brutal caricature and it extends even to the kids’ names, “Gavin” and “Kaitlin” being the kind of trendy monikers (at least, twenty years ago) bestowed by parents who care more about how their kids reflect on them than about the kids themselves. None of that is evident anywhere in the other families in “Moms I’d Like to Forget”. Neither the husbands, the wives or the kids stand out, nor are any of them held up for ridicule. There’s no over competitive fathers who push their kids too hard, there’s no backstabbing mother who destroys her friends with gossip, there’s no rotten kid who takes things too far or deliberately fucks with his parents. Instead they’re just bland background characters, recognizable as modern Americans only cosmetically. There are a lot of stereotypes they could have made fun of here. [Note: Dave couldn’t make it this week. In fact, this whole week has been something of a clusterfuck.] Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we begin? Mad Jon: Sounds good. Charlie Sweatpants: The opening, with Bart having a long dream sequence which was then followed by an action sequence, a little over the top, yes? Mad Jon: Yeah, I thought the dream sequence would end with him getting hit in the head by the dodge ball with which he imagined he would secure victory. Imagine my surprise when the 30 second clip was followed by a 30 second action sequence that didn’t really accomplish anything other than an age war. Charlie Sweatpants: The whole thing was an exercise in time killing. Something that could’ve been done in about thirty seconds was stretched out to a good two minutes. The sports cliche bit at the end of…
Compare & Contrast: Marge and Other Women
“Pleased to meet you. You look like such a happy bunch . . . of people.” – Marge Simpson In film criticism there is a concept known as the “Bechdel Test”, which is a kind of quick and dirty measurement of whether or not a movie has any female characters that rise above the level of tokenism or decoration. There are a few variations, but the basic concept is that there needs to be at least one conversation between two named, female characters that isn’t about a male. I was thinking about this during one of the many scenes where Marge and the three other moms sit and exposit at each other, and it dawned on me that of the four of them, only Marge actually had a name. Oh sure, Marge mentions “Anita’s family” when talking to Homer, but we have no idea which one is Anita; the name is never used when any of them are actually on screen. Maybe they’re all named Anita. From left to right: Marge, Anita?, Anita?, Anita?. None of the husbands or the kids had names either, but they weren’t the focus of what was supposed to be the main story, and they did get at least some individual attention. The fifth grade kid introduced the episode, and the sandy haired husband rode Homer’s case far more than the other two. It wasn’t much, but you could get a slight feel for who they were supposed to be. Not so with the three women whose interactions with Marge were ostensibly the central plot. We never see the Anitas do anything other than gab with Marge. We don’t know what they do, we never see only one of them interact with Marge (or anyone else). They just show up on screen like some kind of inseparable three headed creature with one collective mind. They have no individual personality whatsoever. Compare that to the rich women at Springfield Glen Country Club. For starters, they have names! And not just any names, elaborately pronounced rich people names that require delicate tonal inflection, precise vowel control, and extra syllables. From left to right: Su-san, Gillian, Patri-cia, Eliza-beth, Robert-a, Marge, and Evelyn. More important than the fact that they passed the Bechdel Test with flying colors, they actually have character. We start by meeting Evelyn, who remembers Marge from high school even though they “ran with different crowds”. Evelyn herself isn’t all that special in her crowd, but she is the one who introduces Marge to the world of elegance and respectability. Thus, Evelyn has a motivation – a word Zombie Simpsons is very uncomfortable with – to see Marge succeed in the group, because if Marge fails by being too boorish or unsophisticated, Evelyn also fails for misjudging her. We even see the payoff for this when she lays it on thick with Marge, “And I just know you’ll have a lovely new outfit!”. That’s what’s known as an iron fist in a velvet glove, on the…
Sit, Zombie Simpsons, Sit
“Oh, yes, sitting, the great leveler, from the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?” – C.M. Burns Despite watching it once and fast forwarding through it a second time, I’m still not sure what the main plot of “Moms I’d Like to Forget” was. Most Simpsons episodes since the dawn of the show have had a main plot, sometimes accompanied by a second one that fills in the time or complements the main one in some way. But “Moms I’d Like to Forget” didn’t seem to have an A-plot at all, at best it had two B-plots and a whole mess of extended filler sequences. Certainly the title would lead you to think that the story with Marge and the other mothers was the main plot, which is what I thought at first. But when you take a second to think about it, the other three mothers are hardly on screen. Not only do they not show up at all until almost halfway through the episode, but when they are on screen, literally all they do is sit there. Here they are when we first see them: And here they are the next time they’re on screen: Here we can see a more advanced form of sitting, with a slight recline: And now, in a flashback, thrill to their ability to sit without the aid of furniture: Finally, we come to the denouement of this particular B-plot, sitting on a couch: That is all five scenes in which we see the titular characters (not counting the picture Marge has of them – wait for it – sitting), and in not one instance does any one of them do anything. The only time we see them standing is in a photo in Marge’s scrapbook (which she naturally keeps in the bathroom). But when that photo dissolves into a flashback, why, look what they’re doing: I have a hard time calling anything that static the main plot. (The only on-screen movement the three of them engage in comes during that thoughtless porno setup at the end, and even then they remained seated. Somewhere, Bryan Safi sheds a single tear.) There isn’t even anything that could qualify as interesting dialog going on, which becomes painfully apparent during the fifth sit session when they try to wrap things up by having Marge say: “I remember why I left this group seven years ago, and it’s why I’m leaving now. Good day, ladies.” That’s all well and good, except that Marge wasn’t the one who spent the rest of the episode trying to remember what happened. That was Bart. Marge knew what happened all along, but all that sitting apparently numbed the writers to the point that, when it came time to craft an ending, they couldn’t remember which of their two main characters was going through which story. There was more to the episode of course, including another resolution-less B-plot where Bart didn’t do much. The rest of…
Sunday Preview: Moms I’d Like to Forget
Dave has neither power nor internet at his house at the moment, but it’s okay because there is no promo image this week that needs to be zombified in Photoshop. Instead all we have is this from Simpsons Channel: When Bart discovers that a fifth grader has a scar identical to one Bart has, Marge tells him about a club of mothers she was in once where they set playdates for their kids; when she tries to reform the club, things turn out better for Marge than they do for Bart. The channel guide on my television isn’t any more informative: Marge reconnects with a group of mom. No, there is no “s” on the end of “mom”. So it’s another pun title and other than that we don’t know much. Given Zombie Simpsons affinity for wrenching plot twists, does anyone want to bet that the whole play group story line is either a) entirely in the first act or b) entirely in the final act?Unfortunately, FOX has the late playoff game this afternoon, and since it’s the one with Michal Vick the ratings are going to be huge and will likely bleed into Zombie Simpsons. Oh, and that Bob’s Burgers show premiers tonight as well. Despite the involvement of funny people like H. Jon Benjamin and Kristen Schaal, it looks pretty bad. I’ll probably give it a shot, but I don’t have much hope.