In the comments for this week’s Reading Digest Jake pointed out this article from AVClub: How I ended up in Morgan Spurlock’s Simpsons documentary (barely) The bearded guy was Steven Hyden a writer with the A.V. Club. Here’s the skinny: I grew up a huge Simpsons fan, but I haven’t watched the show regularly in about 10 years because, well, it has sort of sucked for a long time. Unless you’re a deeply deluded Simpsons fanatic, it seems pretty obvious that the show is several years past its peak. Anyway, that’s the gist of what I said in this Crosstalk I wrote with Nathan Rabin more than two and a half years ago. Fast forward to July 2009, when I got a call from a producer working for Spurlock. She was looking for somebody to make precisely that argument, and after reading the Crosstalk she wanted me to be a part of the show. Finally, gleefully pissing all over a beloved pop-culture institution had paid off! (Damn it, I knew we should’ve started this site three years ago! Oh well.) Along with a lot of other things the segment got cut from the special, but thanks to the miracle of the internet you can still see it in all its glory: Given the fact that they took the time to edit this into a proper segment (at the end they even put in the little logo so they could go to commercial) I wonder how much else didn’t make the cut? In his article Hyden mentions that they shot over 200 hours of footage for the whole special, but that doesn’t really surprise me. Raw footage stacks up pretty quick (if they filmed the whole baseball game plus some time before and after that’s 4-5 hours right there). But this segment was edited together for broadcast. Anyone want to take bets on whether or not we’ll get a special extended edition of this thing on home video? I wouldn’t mind seeing that, Spurlock found a lot of cool stuff. Thanks Jake!
Tag: Our Commenters Rule
Simpsons & Tom Jones
Via our wonderful commenters last week I learned that the scene where Grandpa and Bea flirtatiously take their pills was from the 1963 film version of “Tom Jones”. (Sadly, Netflix has just informed me that it’s not available on DVD at the moment. Really?) That reminded me of this page (it was linked on boingboing two years ago) which has image by image comparisons of famous movie scenes and their Simpsons equivalents. Here are the “Tom Jones” ones: There are, obviously, a bunch more on there and if you scroll all the way to the bottom they even have links to a few specific movies.