– By Gran2 The plethora of Season 22 guest stars filled me with rage. This show is bad enough already without Danica Patrick, Paul Rudd or Mark ‘Facebook’ Zuckerberg turning up to dig it even closer to Earth’s core. I dreaded hearing Al Jean rattle off next season’s list at Comic-Con (spoilers: It included Michael Cera). The point is: guest stars suck now. The really obscure ones suck because you have no idea who they are, or why they are there (pretty much every guest star from seasons 11 and 12 falls into to this category, or maybe that’s because…
Tag: $pringfield
Reading Digest: 1950s Television Edition
We’ve got three links this week that deal with the ancient dawn of television, some more unintentionally funny than others. There’s also a guy who draws Bart obsessively, alumni updates for Groening and Kavner, some sweet YouTube, and plenty of excellent usage. Enjoy. The Greatest TV Writers Rooms Ever – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this exhaustive and informative article about the most revered television writing groups ever. It starts all the way back in the 1950s, and displays the proper apathy toward Zombie Simpsons by only including people who wrote for the show through Season 5. I…
Quote of the Day
“Marge, we need to talk. You’re spending too much time at the casino and I think you may have a problem.” – Homer Simpson “I won sixty dollars last night.” – Marge Simpson “Woo-hoo, problem solved!” – Homer Simpson
Compare & Contrast: Magic Tricks
“Behold the box of mystery!” – Milhouse van Houten About halfway through the ridiculous (in a bad way) main plot of “The Great Simpsina”, what’s-his-face (The Great Raymondo) takes Lisa under his wing and tells her the secret he’s kept for decades. In yet another example of the way the attention span of Zombie Simpsons is measured in microseconds, the show treats this revelation as poignant and moving, even going so far as to have the old magician finally decide to tell her after he mentions that he has no children and compares Lisa to his beloved and long departed…
Leftovers
“You gotta improvise, Lisa. Cloves, Tom Collins mix, frozen pie crust . . .” – Homer Simpson Have you ever stood in your kitchen, staring at bare cabinets and empty refrigerator shelves, and tried to cobble together one last meal before the next trip to the store? You’ve got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and hey, those two might work together. Sometimes a bunch of scraps go down unexpectedly well. Sometimes they do not. “Homer the Father” is that disastrous third case where you find yourself trying to induce vomiting just minutes after sitting down…
Quote of the Day
“Your lifelong dream was to be a contestant on ‘The Gong Show’, and you did it in 1977, remember?” – Marge Simpson “We got more gongs than the break dancing robot that caught on fire.” – Homer Simpson
Sunday Afternoon Cartoons
“And special awards go to the two students who obviously had no help from their parents, Lisa Simpson and Ralph Wiggum.” – Principal Skinner Parental neglect is one of those things a lesser show would treat with respect, not The Simpsons. Half the plot of “$pringfield”, which would be a masterpiece for any other program but is instead just par for the course, is about Marge’s gambling induced inattention of her kids, specifically her elder daughter. In the hands of lesser storytellers, Marge would’ve had a big emotional moment with Lisa. Instead, Lisa’s worst nightmare, the thing she most dreads,…
Cities on the Grow
“It’s a proud day as Springfield is declared one of America’s four hundred fastest growing cities.” – Narrator Via Burn Down Blog comes this excellent example of the kind of short form propaganda films that were the basis for “Springfield: City on the Grow” at the beginning of “$pringfield”. “NEWS of the DAY” produced this in 1963 as part of “The Changing Face of Great American Cities”. (I’m not sure how well the embedding will work here, the site that’s hosting the video is a little odd, so if you can’t see it you can view it directly at the…
Quote of the Day
“They’re all covered with filthy germs, aren’t they Smithers?” – Mr. Burns “Why, what do you mean, sir?” – Mr. Smithers “Freemasons run the country!” – Germs
Quote of the Day
Image from Wikipedia. “Hi. You from the casino?” – Robert Goulet “I’m from a casino.” – Bart Simpson “Good enough, let’s go.” – Robert Goulet
Burn in Hell, News Corp
“Sir, bad news from accounting, the economy’s hit us pretty hard.” – Mr. Smithers “Heh, tough times, huh? I’ve lived through twelve recessions, eight panics, and five years of McKinleynomics. I’ll survive this.” – C.M. Burns “Even so, sir, we could stand to lay off a few employees.” – Mr. Smithers If our grim economic times are to have a silver lining, this might be it. From The New York Times: The News Corporation, the media empire controlled by Mr. Murdoch, said Thursday that it lost $6.4 billion in its second quarter as profit fell sharply at its television and…